BASIL: All this psychiatry, it’s a load of tommy-rot. You know what they’re all obsessed with, don’t you? … You know what they say it’s all about, don’t you? Hmm? Sex. Everything’s connected with sex. Coh! What a load of cobblers!
– Fawlty Towers, ‘The Psychiatrist’, 26 February 1979
ROBIN DAY: Why should a man of your charm and personality have to go to whores for sex?
ANTONY LAMBTON: I think that people sometimes like variety. I think it’s as simple as that and I think that impulse is understood by almost everybody. Don’t you?
– Panorama, 25 May 1973
On Friday, 16 April 1971, a retired Shropshire schoolmistress went to the cinema. Mrs Mary Whitehouse was one of a hand-picked audience invited to the West End premiere of Dr Martin Cole’s film Growing Up, a thirty-minute sex education film – ‘in colour’, as the papers excitedly noted – that broke new ground not just in the frankness of its advice, but in the explicitness of its imagery. As the eclectic audience of schoolteachers, educationalists, moral campaigners and wide-eyed teenagers watched with a mixture of fascination, horror and indifference, they saw full-frontal nude shots of teenage boys and girls, long sequences showing a teenage boy and a young woman masturbating, and to cap it all, a fifteen-second shot of a couple actually having sex. And even though Mrs Whitehouse had spent the previous eight years campaigning across the land against the ravages of obscenity and permissiveness, she had never seen anything like it. As she emerged pale and blinking into the spring sunlight of Soho, she made her feelings quite clear. ‘Educationally speaking, it is a rotten film,’ she said angrily, ‘which makes children no more than animals.’ It was ‘balderdash’, agreed her friend Lord Longford, who was already beginning to carve out a reputation as a moral campaigner in his own right. But not all of the audience shared their horrified reaction. ‘It was good,’ remarked Janet Caunt, a 16-year-old from Baldock in Hertfordshire. ‘I think this is the sort of film that is needed. I did not find it at all embarrassing. It was done very tastefully.’1
The man at the centre of the Growing Up storm, Dr Martin Cole, was not, perhaps, a very good advert for sexual permissiveness. As Mrs Whitehouse immediately pointed out, he was neither a doctor of medicine nor a trained teacher; in fact, he was a 39-year-old biologist who, while working at Birmingham’s Aston University, had become involved with the nationwide campaigns for legal abortion and free contraception, setting up Birmingham branches of the Abortion Law Reform Association and Pregnancy Advisory Service, and then his own ‘Institute for Sex Education and Research’. Cole himself admitted that he had an ‘obsessional’ interest in sexual freedom, which he traced back to a ‘crisis over guilt over masturbation’ that he had suffered when he was 17. And whereas earlier campaigners for sex education had urged a self-consciously sensible, even conservative approach, he made no secret of his highly libertarian views. ‘I think teenagers should be promiscuous,’ he told the Guardian. ‘I think being promiscuous can, in many cases, be a vitally important part of growing up.’ At least he practised what he preached: unfortunately for the image of his film, he had already been married and divorced twice when the scandal broke. Even more unfortunately, he had only just married again, this time to an attractive former student, sixteen years his junior. And when his critics discovered that his wife worked in his clinic as a ‘surrogate therapist’, sleeping with paying customers who said they had sexual problems, his image as a ‘decadent middle-aged roué’ and glorified brothel-keeper was confirmed. ‘Sex King Cole’, some papers called him, or just plain ‘Dr Sex’.2
Given the extraordinarily explicit content of his film, Cole must have realized that Growing Up would provoke a storm. Immediately after having seen it, Mrs Whitehouse wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Michael Ramsey, who duly issued a measured but nonetheless hostile verdict, explaining that Cole’s enthusiasm for sex outside marriage made it ‘unsuitable for use in schools’. In Birmingham, meanwhile, the local education authority demanded that Cole put on a special screening, and once they had seen it, they banned it. There were rather more drastic consequences for one of the amateur actors involved in the film, for the masturbating woman turned out to be a 23-year-old Birmingham teacher called Jennifer Muscutt, who was promptly suspended from duty. Meanwhile the controversy was threatening to spill over into the national political arena: on 21 April, the Education Secretary, Margaret Thatcher, told the Commons that although she had not seen the film, she had sent one of her ‘professional advisers’ and understood that it ‘shows the sex act and some sequences on masturbation’. Although she had no direct power to ban it, she said earnestly, she was ‘very perturbed’ at the thought of it being shown in schools, and urged local authorities to treat it ‘with extreme caution’. But her advice was probably unnecessary: by the end of the year, there was no record of it having been shown to schoolchildren anywhere. Desperate to drum up publicity, Cole agreed to a screening at, of all places, a Birmingham strip-club, but then changed his mind when reminded that if he took money in return for letting people watch it, he could be charged as a pornographer. Finally, the affair reached a kind of bathetic climax when he showed the film to students at Oxford University. According to the student newspaper, though, the general reaction was awe at the unusual athleticism of the couple having sex (‘one could sense every male beginning to doubt himself’) – not, perhaps, the reaction Cole had anticipated.3
The odd thing about the Growing Up controversy was not so much the furore about a film that virtually no one had ever seen, but the fact that people were arguing about sex education at all. Until the late 1960s, sex education had rarely been a subject of public debate, and most politicians took the line that as ‘an effective tool in the fight against venereal disease’, its introduction was a welcome development. Most experts agreed that children were woefully uninformed about sex, with neither parents nor teachers inclined to enlighten them. Two out of three teenage boys, the researcher Michael Schofield reported in the mid-1960s, had been told nothing by their parents, and much of what passed for their knowledge was ‘inaccurate and obscene’. And even after the Growing Up scandal, there was still a strong sense in political circles that sex education should be defended as a good thing. When Mary Whitehouse asked her to give parents the legal right to remove their children from sex education lessons, Mrs Thatcher refused point-blank, although she added that she hoped that schools would respect the views of parents who had strong objections. And in a Commons debate in May 1971 Mrs Thatcher even stood up for sex education against her own backbenchers. They should not let Growing Up make them ‘get the whole subject out of perspective,’ she said, for ‘some very excellent work on sex education is being done in the schools in a way of which the parents approve and which is tasteful and satisfactory to all concerned’.4
And yet already the reaction against liberalized sex education was gathering pace, thanks not only to the noisy protests of conservative commentators and Christian pressure groups, but also to a broader sense of disquiet that the ‘traditional’ British family was under threat. In the nine months after the Growing Up controversy, the press reported the establishment of Lord Longford’s unofficial commission to investigate pornography; the foundation of a group called the Responsible Society, aimed at reversing the tide of sexual permissiveness; the launch of an anti-permissive religious revival movement in the Nationwide Festival of Light; and blazing controversies over sex and violence in four major films, The Devils, Family Life, Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange. Against this background, sex education seemed to many people a symbol of a gathering storm of moral corruption, splintering families and sexual chaos, promoted by an unholy coalition of addled-headed liberals and profit-crazed pornographers. Even Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, the newspaper that best exemplified the new fascination with sex and self-gratification, thought that ‘people are getting sick of a society which has made emotional and physical demands on people whose minds and bodies are too unformed to cope’. And in an atmosphere of ‘sexual jealousy, unemployment and social conflict’, agreed the women’s style magazine Nova, this was the ‘authentic voice of the British backlash’.5
In the public memory, the 1960s are now indelibly stamped as the decade of the sexual revolution, a watershed in social history marked by a new mood of liberalism and tolerance, the retreat of the state from private life and a move towards greater sexual freedom and self-indulgence. Historians often write of a ‘permissive moment’ between roughly 1958 and 1970, when decades of public pressure bore fruit in the relaxation of laws governing everything from gambling, suicide and obscenity to divorce, abortion and homosexuality – a ‘historic shift’, as one scholar puts it, that meant individual morality was no longer governed by law, and that a gay man, for example, could pursue physical happiness without being hounded by the state. At the same time, at least according to the conventional wisdom, technological innovations like the Pill were radically changing everyday sexual behaviour both within and outside marriage. ‘It is no longer possible,’ the novelist Margaret Drabble told readers of the Guardian in 1967, ‘to deny that we face the certainty of a sexual revolution.’ Thanks to the ‘new contraceptive techniques’, Drabble explained, ‘a woman need no longer dread pain, or years of motherhood, or even, on the crudest level, discovery, as the result of her sexual activities. Nor, on a higher level, need she fear the guilt of bringing into the world a child for which she may not be able to provide. She is free now, as never before.’6
In fact, the lazy stereotype of the permissive, self-indulgent 1960s is enormously misleading. The landmark reforms of the era, such as the abolition of capital punishment and the legalization of homosexuality, were passed in defiance of public opinion and remained deeply controversial: when the magazine New Society conducted an extensive poll on public attitudes in 1969, ‘easier laws for homosexuality, divorce, abortion, etc.’ was ranked as comfortably the most unpopular change of the decade. Of course things were gradually changing, largely as a result of greater prosperity and education: sex before marriage, for example, was much less of a taboo than it had once been, and by the end of the 1960s only one in four men was a virgin on his wedding day (although, intriguingly, two out of three brides were still virgins). By and large, however, the great majority of the British population – who rarely feature, of course, in rose-tinted retrospectives of the Swinging Sixties – remained remarkably conservative both in attitudes and in behaviour. Even most teenagers, supposedly in the vanguard of permissiveness and self-gratification, made very unconvincing sexual revolutionaries. Research by the pioneering sociologist Michael Schofield found that most teenage boys in the mid-1960s not only expected their bride to be a virgin, but agreed that a boy should marry a girl if he got her pregnant. Schofield’s teenagers had great respect for marriage, disliked homosexuality and generally led lives of remarkable chastity: more than two out of three boys and three out of four girls were still virgins. And even at the end of the decade, other surveys reported similar findings; in Sex and Marriage in England Today (1971), Geoffrey Gorer wrote that although attitudes were becoming more tolerant, only one in ten people was even vaguely promiscuous, and overall ‘England still appears to be a very chaste society’.7
Of course this flies in the face of the tiresome and sadly invincible myth that sexual intercourse began in 1963, with the advent of the Pill as the decisive factor. In fact, while the Pill first went on trial in the glamorous settings of Birmingham and Slough in 1960, most women could not get hold of it until ten years later. Only a handful of pioneering Brook Advisory Centres – mocked at the time as ‘teenage sex clinics’ – handed out the Pill to young single women, while the much bigger Family Planning Association network catered for married couples only. By the end of the decade, therefore, Geoffrey Gorer found that only 4 per cent of single women were taking the Pill, while fewer than one in five young married couples used it – typically, affluent young professionals, because at that time the Pill was the only drug for which doctors were allowed to charge a fee. In other words, although the advent of the Pill is often seen as both a symbol and an instigator of sexual liberalization, the early story of the Pill is a much better reflection of the sheer conservatism of moral attitudes. It was only in 1968, after all, that the Family Planning Association grudgingly allowed some of its branches to give contraception to unmarried women. And for all the excitement in the press about the wonder contraceptive drug, many people remained suspicious of the Pill. Many men disliked giving up their control over contraception, and working-class couples were much less likely to use it than middle-class ones. When the Evening Standard commissioned a poll in 1971 asking whether it should be available to single women, 32 per cent still said no, with opposition highest among women over 65. Most younger women who had tried it were great fans; even so, one in three women under 44 and even one in five women under 24 opposed giving it to unmarried women – a useful reminder that not everybody was swept up in the enthusiasm for change.8
The crucial breakthrough in the availability of the Pill came in 1970, when, under pressure from the government, the Family Planning Association instructed all its clinics to make it available to single women. This was without doubt a landmark moment: although the pioneering Brook clinics had led the way in legitimizing the provision of the Pill to young women, there were so few of them that they could not possibly reach the majority of the population. From 1970, however, hundreds of FPA clinics were required to make provision for single women, and five years later, the FPA having been absorbed into the National Health Service, contraception was made free for all women, married or single. At the time, some Tory backbenchers and tabloid critics made a great fuss about ‘sex on the rates’. Yet within just a few years it was clear that as a relatively simple and highly effective form of contraception, the Pill was enormously popular. As early as 1973, surveys showed that 65 per cent of young women had taken it, and this rose to 74 per cent two years later. And even though a health scare – based on reports in the Lancet in 1977 that the Pill increased the risk of thrombosis in older women – temporarily damaged its popularity, there is no denying its overall impact: by the end of the 1980s, almost nine out of ten young women had taken it. For the first time women had a reliable contraceptive about which there was no need to feel squeamish or embarrassed – ‘It’s absolutely safe and no fiddling about – so natural,’ ‘It’s just like not using anything and you can really relax and enjoy it,’ women told an interviewer in 1970 – and for the first time they had complete control over their own fertility. The Pill meant that ‘sex was not a big risk any more and neither were men’, one young woman recalled. Even after she stopped taking it, she still basked in the confidence it had brought. ‘I was allowed to have what I liked,’ she said, ‘and did not have to be frightened of sex because it could trap me into things. I didn’t have to be punished.’9
One of the many myths about the Pill was that because it gave women control over their own fertility, it represented an extraordinary and revolutionary breakthrough, opening the door to a new age of heedless promiscuity. We tend to forget, though, that men and women had been using reasonably reliable methods of birth control for years, such as the condom or the cap. Even after 1970, many women stuck to more familiar devices, and it is not true that it immediately inaugurated an era of wild abandon. In 1972, a survey of 3,000 women for the Sunday Times concluded that ‘the more promiscuous you are, the less likely you are to be on the Pill’. Yet there is no doubt that the popularization of the Pill did mark a crucial turning point, not just in behaviour, but in the way people talked and thought about sex. As the medical researcher Ann Cartwright pointed out in 1970, ‘an oral contraceptive could be discussed more easily and with less embarrassment than methods related to the vagina, penis or sexual intercourse’, prompting people to talk much more openly about the entire subject. And in a broader sense the Pill came to symbolize a whole series of related innovations, from the new divorce and abortion laws to the spread of family planning clinics and the general acceptability of various forms of birth control. We commonly think of all this as a ‘sexual revolution’, although the crude division into pre-revolutionary monasticism and post-revolutionary hedonism obscures the fact that some people had been buying condoms, sex manuals and the services of prostitutes for decades anyway. As the historian Hera Cook points out, the events of the late 1960s and early 1970s were merely the latest stage in a long history of change – a ‘long sexual revolution’, indeed – stretching back to the nineteenth century. And yet the Family Planning Association’s decision on the Pill in 1970 makes as good a dividing line as any. With that decision, generations of women were handed unprecedented control over their own fertility, breaking the historic bond between sex and childbirth. From that point onwards, there was no going back.10
Ironically, the crucial point about the sexual revolution is that it made sex not more but less important. Before the early 1970s, having sex had ‘immense emotional, economic and symbolic weight’ attached to it, as Cook puts it, because to sleep with another person was ‘tantamount to choosing them as a life partner’. Even in the kitchen-sink plays and novels of the early 1960s, for example, having sex is a literally life-changing moment and something to be taken intensely seriously. The plot of Stan Barstow’s novel A Kind of Loving (1960) shows the consequences of getting it wrong: when Vic, the protagonist, gets an office typist pregnant, he is condemned to spend the rest of his life with her, even though he clearly does not love her. But by the mid-1970s this had clearly changed. The bohemian academics Howard and Barbara in Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975) or the Robin Askwith character in the film Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974) may have sex with anybody they fancy, but they take it much less seriously: the ubiquity of contraception and availability of abortion have taken the danger out of it. And of course this helps to explain why, from the mid-1970s onwards, sex became the perfect vehicle for advertisers and marketing men. Supposedly liberated from its ‘social ceremony and emotional baggage’, no longer seen in terms of a life-changing commitment, it was increasingly presented as the ultimate consumer luxury. As Jeremy Seabrook noted after observing teenage girls discussing their love affairs in Blackburn, ‘their concern with their sexuality, their looks, their sensuality, is readily turned to profit’, from cosmetics that promised to make girls more alluring to magazines offering tips on getting and pleasing a man. And all of this hammered home the simple message that sex was no longer serious; it was fun.11
With the link between sex and childbearing broken, the new orthodoxy emphasized sex as pure pleasure, not just a means of self-indulgence but a form of self-expression. ‘An active and rewarding sex life, at a mature level, is indispensable if one is to achieve his full potential as a member of the human race,’ wrote the Californian sex therapist David Reuben in his manual Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), published in 1969. Of course sex manuals were nothing new: between 1941 and 1964, Eustace Chesser’s Love Without Fear had sold an estimated 3 million copies, despite being available only through mail order and in backstreet shops. But in its emphasis on pleasure rather than procreation, on gratification rather than reproduction, Reuben’s manual typified the new mood. Even the wording of the title – ‘sex’ rather than ‘love’ – reflected the deeper change, a point made even more emphatically by another bestseller three years later. Published in 1972 by the London-based obstetrician, anarchist and poet Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex was an urbane, explicit sex manual modelled on a cookery book: hence the subtitle, ‘A Gourmet Guide’, and the section titles ‘Starters’, ‘Main Courses’ and so on. Groundbreaking in the frankness of its recommendations, the book also boasted some now splendidly dated illustrations that gave the male participant a shabby beard and the woman a luxuriant growth of underarm hair. But the illustrations were not the only things that soon proved anachronistic. Prostitutes, Comfort explains at one point, are usually motivated by ‘an active dislike of males’, while ‘the expression of erotic astonishment on the face of a well-gagged woman when she finds she can only mew is irresistible to most men’s rape instincts’. These sections, needless to say, did not survive in later editions. But they did no harm to the original version’s prospects: not only did it sell hundreds of thousands of copies in Britain, it spent a stunning seventy weeks in the American bestseller list between 1972 and 1974, and never went out of print.12
It is impossible to know how many people actually followed Comfort’s recommendations, or indeed how many read the book for titillation rather than instruction. But there is little doubt that in the course of one generation, sexual behaviour and attitudes had undergone a tremendous change. Now that having sex was no longer a necessarily life-changing decision, manuals, newspapers and medical experts alike began to treat it not as a private expression of intimacy between husband and wife, but as the ultimate form of recreation. Just as contemporary travel guides opened readers’ eyes to the pleasures of Mediterranean holidays, just as cookery books recommended exotic new dinner-party recipes, so magazines like Cosmopolitan advised readers to set their standards ever higher, urging them to maximize the quantity and quality of their orgasms, the bewildering variety of their partners and positions, the intensity and frequency of their sexual experiences. Even the female body was no longer sacrosanct; to anybody who read Cosmopolitan, it seemed less like a temple and more like a playground. ‘To awaken your body and make it perform well, you must train like an athlete for the act of love,’ advised another manual, The Sensuous Woman, in 1970. In this context, the idea of remaining chaste until your wedding day seemed not merely unproductive but downright bizarre. The days when nice girls said no seemed to be long gone: by 1978 a divorced teacher in her thirties could write to Cosmopolitan complaining that ‘nowadays you go out with a man and it’s simply assumed that you are an emancipated woman who will fall into bed’.13
Of course not all women fell into bed on their first date: in a survey published in 1976, the researcher Michael Schofield reported that only 60 out of 376 young adults he interviewed were genuinely promiscuous (although even this figure marked a dramatic shift from ten years earlier). Still, given the context, the disgruntled teacher’s suitors were not being excessively optimistic. In the first half of the 1950s, most girls had lost their virginity between the ages of 19 and 23; by the first half of the 1970s, most lost their virginity between 17 and 20. Perhaps more importantly, the vast majority of young women by the mid-1970s lost their virginity before they were married. As late as 1963, two-thirds of the population had believed that sex before marriage was immoral (even though many people fell short of their own high moral standards). By 1973, however, just one in ten people did so, and as attitudes changed, so did behaviour. More than 86 per cent of women who reached adulthood in the first half of the 1970s had sex before marriage, and by the end of the decade premarital chastity had almost died out. By the late 1980s, in fact, fewer than 1 per cent of women were virgins on their wedding day – an extraordinary transformation given that the equivalent figure in the late 1960s was more like two out of three. At the same time, the taboo on unmarried couples living together was clearly evaporating, not just among the young, but among their elders too. When the journalist Mary Ingham interviewed a group of 30-year-old women at the end of the 1970s, many recalled that their parents had actively encouraged them to live together before marriage. One young couple, Shirley and John, were always ‘worried’ how much their parents knew about their relationship, yet, as Shirley recalled, in 1971 her mother ‘suggested it would be cheaper if we lived together and I thought heavens, it’s my mother saying that!’14
From one perspective, of course, the sexual revolution of the 1970s represented a genuine moment of liberation, allowing generations of young men and women to experience physical pleasures, apparently free from guilt or consequences, that had been denied their predecessors. And yet even at the time perceptive observers recognized that despite the naive optimism of the manuals and magazines, sexual self-indulgence did not come without a cost. One obvious consequence, for instance, was the stunning rise in illegitimacy. In 1964, just 7 per cent of children had been born out of wedlock; by 1971, the equivalent proportion was up to 8.4 per cent, by 1981 almost 13 per cent, and by the 1990s it was well on its way towards 40 per cent. It is true that single parents and illegitimate children were no longer ostracized as they once had been: in 1967 special tax allowances were extended to unmarried mothers, in 1975 illegitimate children were granted inheritance rights, in 1976 family allowances were extended to the first child in a one-parent family, and in 1979 the Law Commission recommended that courts no longer distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate children – all of which infuriated conservatives, for whom the state itself was undermining the traditional family. Even so, single mothers still found life hard and society highly censorious, which perhaps explains why abortion clinics saw so much trade.15
When abortion had been legalized in 1967, most people had seen it as a long-overdue measure to regulate an appallingly dangerous backstreet business. Most historians agree that there were perhaps 100,000 illegal abortions a year during the 1950s and early 1960s, many of them horrifyingly rushed and bloody affairs in dingy flats and dirty bathrooms. As the vast majority of the public saw it – as well as the Anglican churchmen who were in the vanguard of the movement for change – legalizing abortion was a humane and sensible measure to safeguard the lives of thousands of frightened women; by the mid-1960s, polls showed that at least seven out of ten people supported it. What nobody had expected, however, was that the abortion figures would then go through the roof; indeed, most experts predicted that after a brief flurry, abortion would decline as better contraception and sex education made it unnecessary. In fact, the opposite happened. In 1968, there were 23,641 abortions; a year later there were 58,819; a year after that there were 83,851; and by 1973 the total was up to 169,362. At the time, critics insisted that this must mean that young women were treating abortion as merely another form of birth control, and that its popularity reflected ‘an increase in promiscuity and immorality coupled with a crude, cynical, hedonistic attitude to sex’, as one academic study put it in 1972. But the same study went on to debunk that argument. Most of the unmarried women who had had abortions, it emerged, were ‘generally sexually inexperienced’, and their plight was the result of excessive naivety rather than cynical calculation. No doubt some had been reckless or foolish, but they surely deserved pity rather than condemnation.16
Perhaps not surprisingly, many people were deeply disturbed at the enormous surge in legal abortions, and throughout the 1970s the Catholic Church and other conservative groups organized rallies, demonstrations and lobbying efforts, which in turn provoked feminists to set up the National Abortion Campaign to defend women’s newfound rights. Yet while the great majority were essentially indifferent to the abortion controversy, it was a powerful reminder that the sexual revolution came at a price. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, there had been plenty of childish waffle about sex as liberating, radical, even subversive, inspired by the legacy of fashionable cod-Marxist thinkers such as Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse.* By the mid-1970s, however, it was already clear that there was a darker side to the sexual revolution, typified by the last scene in The History Man, in which, even as the predatory academic Howard is seducing a colleague at one of his debauched parties, his wife Barbara is slashing her own arm open in an apparent suicide attempt. Indeed, for all the talk about sex as emancipation, it was predators like Howard, who played on the insecurity, confusion and vulnerability of others, that were the real winners – in the short term at least. Women ‘were so brainwashed by the desire not to appear repressed and old-fashioned’, wrote Mary Ingham, that they were frightened to say no to men, even when they were recoiling inside. ‘The line was, we’re all friends, we all sleep with each other, and it’s all fine,’ another woman recalled. ‘Actually, it never was fine for us girls. But you had to pretend that it was.’17
The irony is that within just a few years, many of the people who had initially welcomed the sexual revolution – who had, indeed, congratulated themselves at their own emancipation and looked forward eagerly to the collapse of international capitalism beneath the tide of sexual self-expression – were lamenting that it had gone badly wrong. One book published in 1978 even called it The Illusory Freedom. Perhaps that was going too far: the new freedoms allowing a couple to sleep together before marriage, homosexuals to lead open and unashamed lives, and women to terminate unwanted pregnancies, were real enough. Yet while people no longer chafed under the legal restraints that had survived until the late 1960s, they had arguably replaced one set of pressures with another. At the beginning of the following decade, a survey by 19 magazine found that 70 per cent of readers had lost their virginity by the time they were 17, yet 69 per cent agreed that young women came under ‘too much pressure’ to have sex, and two out of three admitted that they sometimes found it difficult to say no.
What you became terribly aware of in the seventies [one woman said later] was that it wasn’t free for women, it was an absolute imposition. The Pill removed your autonomy. Suddenly, you were supposed to think that it was absolutely fabulous to wave your legs in the air and get fucked … What did women get out of it? Lots of bad sex that they probably didn’t want, men thinking that this was Christmas, and lots of sexually transmitted diseases.
The sexual revolution ‘may have expanded women’s access to sex’, concluded the feminist Beatrix Campbell, ‘but it was the same old kind of sex’.18
Thin, drawn and anxious, her pale face staring out under her reddish fringe, 19-year-old Janice Baildon lives at home with her parents on a nondescript suburban estate in Harlow. Her father, a stern and industrious man from Liverpool who once served in the army, works in a large store. Her mother, an overbearing woman of distinctly old-fashioned opinions, is the soul of upper-working-class conservatism. Earnest and respectable, the Baildons are baffled by their daughter’s listless, disaffected behaviour: she drifts from job to job, seems unable to put down roots, and collapses on the Tube, apparently for no reason. As time goes on, Janice’s condition worsens; as her parents nag and pester her, she retreats deeper into herself, ever more lethargic, ever more withdrawn. She falls pregnant by one of her student friends; her parents, horrified at the ‘disgusting and unchristian’ thought of an illegitimate baby, cajole her into having an abortion. Not surprisingly, her mental state worsens, and her parents take her to a sympathetic young experimental psychiatrist, complete with standard-issue black polo neck, who encourages his staff to call him Mike and gets his patients to talk through their problems in long encounter sessions. But when Mike is kicked out of the hospital by reactionary, upper-class administrators, Janice’s condition takes a turn for the worse. She falls into the hands of a cold, clipped doctor who plies her with drugs and electro-convulsive treatment, and although she is briefly rescued by a scooter-riding boyfriend, another doctor forcibly retrieves her with the help of the police. Her mind collapses altogether; when we last see her, she is utterly sullen, apathetic and uncommunicative, staring blankly at an audience of uncaring, half-interested medical students while the doctor invites them to take notes. Her life has been reduced to a schizophrenic case history, her individuality crushed beneath the suffocating expectations of her family and the weight of the state machine. ‘I think the clinical picture is a fairly clear one,’ the doctor says dismissively. ‘Any questions?’
As a portrait of the typical British family, Ken Loach’s film Family Life, released in January 1972 and based on a script by the radical playwright David Mercer, was bleak indeed. Loach and Mercer had already worked together on a similar project for television – In Two Minds, which was shown in the BBC’s Wednesday Play slot five years earlier – and like its predecessor, Family Life attracted praise and controversy in equal measure. Nobody questioned its disturbing power, the brilliance with which Loach had created an atmosphere of utterly convincing naturalism, or his skill at making a tiny budget stretch to capture the texture of everyday life in the early 1970s. And yet, wondered the critic John Russell Taylor in The Times, ‘is it possible to be at once deeply moved and impressed by a film, and at the same time deeply distrustful of it?’ As Taylor pointed out, it seemed at the very least highly unfair to present the first psychiatrist, played by a practising young therapist, Michael Riddall, as a straightforward ‘goody’, while the second, ‘a professional actor doing it all crisp and thin-lipped, is presented as a baddy’. And for all its emotional punch, other reviewers found the film equally one-sided, even mendacious in its partisanship – a criticism that could, in fact, be levelled at so many of Loach’s films. Contemplating ‘the brutalism of electro-shock treatment in the traditional hospital; the soulless arrangement of rows of beds like a conveyor-belt set-up; the Gestapo-like dispositions of medical attendants who come to cart the girl back to the wards at the end’, Alexander Walker wondered why ‘people otherwise so humane and sophisticated still feel the need to allow an audience no choice but to see things their way’. Even the Socialist Worker’s Peter Sedgwick, who applauded Loach’s left-wing commitment, thought that Family Life ‘panders to the common prejudices which create the stigma of mental illness’. The film could not ‘possibly encourage any person with serious mental trouble to seek voluntary treatment from any existing NHS facilities,’ Sedgwick wrote, in a review that attracted a deluge of angry complaints. ‘It can only discourage and frighten them. And it cruelly mocks (through its caricature of the family situation of a schizophrenic patient) the awful dilemmas which confront thousands of actual families in which all, perhaps, are “ill” but one particular person is actually crazy.’19
Like so many self-consciously progressive films and plays in the early 1970s, Family Life was heavily influenced by the ideas of the Scottish psychiatrist, poet and countercultural icon, R. D. Laing. A trained psychotherapist, Laing had more than a few mental issues of his own: his father was a violent and unstable man, his mother was widely regarded as virtually mad, and he was afflicted with alcoholism and clinical depression. By the mid-1960s, however, his pioneering ideas – on the ‘divided self’ under threat from others, or the oppressive tyranny of the ‘family nexus’ – were all the rage. At Kingsley Hall, in the East End of London, he set up a community for therapists and psychotic patients, encouraging the latter to regress into a kind of infantile state, from which he believed they would emerge saner and better adjusted than ever. More often than not, Laing explained madness as the alienated reaction of a confused young man or (more typically) woman to the tyrannical repression of the family. The ‘mad’, he argued, often had a clearer view of reality than people who thought themselves ‘sane’; parents’ affection for their children was really ‘violence masquerading as love’; and the mental health services were running a ‘police state’ and a ‘guerrilla war’ against their patients. ‘They’re the violent ones,’ he insisted in 1967, ‘but they think they are maintaining sanity, peace, law and order.’20
It is hard now to reread Laing’s books without shuddering at the thought of the damage they caused. No doubt traditional psychiatry had its flaws, but its practitioners were generally well-intentioned people trying to do their best for patients who were genuinely sick, and they deserved better than the crude, childish caricatures of Laing’s books and Loach’s film. And although some doctors listened to Laing’s theories with interest and respect, many were appalled that he seemed to be trivializing, even glamorizing the serious illnesses that patients faced. Kingsley Hall, meanwhile, was not a success: local residents were horrified at reports of wild encounter sessions and patients running riot, and it closed down within five years. Yet even as Laing’s medical career spun out of control, his cultural influence grew ever stronger. To a generation of writers and artists who liked nothing better than to poke fun at what they saw as bourgeois assumptions and power structures, the spectacle of an LSD-taking, poetry-writing, Buddhist-influenced ‘anti-psychiatrist’ was too good to resist. Laing ‘made madness, alienation, hating your parents … all glamorous’, wrote the novelist Angela Carter. ‘God knows what he did for people who were really mad, apart from making them feel smug and self-righteous, but he certainly set the pace for the crazy hinge of the decade from 1968 on.’ In the theatre, his influence was ubiquitous, from Edward Bond’s shockingly violent Lear (1971) to Peter Shaffer’s equally powerful, if didactic, Equus (1973), the story of a psychiatrist invited to treat a boy who has a pathological obsession with horses. Indeed, in its own way Equus was the perfect distillation of the fashionable themes of the period: its fascination with ritual and symbols, for example; its obsession with sex and death; its crude satirical treatment of the conservative, Christian parents; its debunking of the psychiatrist’s conventional assumptions; above all, its implicit message that the mad were sane and the sane mad. All of this, like Loach and Mercer’s Family Life, was pure Laing.21
Although Laing himself was in palpable decline by the beginning of the 1970s, lurching bizarrely into a nightmarish world of shamanism, robe-wearing and ‘rebirthing workshops’, his ideas had never been more influential in the cultural mainstream. It was not merely a question of plays and poetry: now academic experts and feminist writers alike queued up to deliver sentence on the supposedly demented, oppressive institution of the nuclear family. When, in the 1967 Reith Lectures, the eminent Cambridge anthropologist Edmund Leach insisted that ‘the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents’, he provoked a firestorm of protest, with tabloid critics fulminating against his godless moral relativism. But within a few years, such opinions were becoming almost conventional. And by the time the curtain rose on Shaffer’s Equus, no self-respecting bohemian could fail to produce an apposite quotation from Laing or Marcuse, while premature obituaries for marriage and the family were as common as wildcat strikes. The idea of a lasting romantic union was historically ‘exceptional’, another anthropologist, Lucy Mair, argued in 1971. Husbands were ‘not necessary’ to bring up children successfully; the single-parent family was the model of the future. Monogamy was an artificial restriction on human urges, agreed Alex Comfort: sex was a natural physical pleasure, like eating, and as long as they did not hurt others, people should be able to do it when and with whom they liked. And perhaps oddly, given that these views were a standing invitation to male predators and implicitly heaped all the burden of childcare onto single mothers, they struck a chord with many feminists, for whom the traditional family was nothing but an instrument of male oppression. ‘We need an ideological revolution,’ wrote the feminist Ann Oakley in 1974. ‘We need to abolish gender roles themselves … Abolish the housewife role, therefore abolish the family.’22
Most people, of course, had no desire to abolish the family. Indeed, by some standards the traditional family was more popular than ever. By the beginning of the decade, 95 per cent of men and 96 per cent of women under the age of 45 were married, while young couples were positively rushing to the altar: in 1970, the average age of brides at marriage fell beneath 23 for the first time since the war. Despite all the nonsense in the newspapers about the generation gap and teenage rebellion, most youngsters dreamed of getting married and settling down like their parents before them; indeed, only a tiny minority of those who came of age in the 1970s never married. It is admittedly true that women in particular had very different expectations from their mothers, placing a much higher premium on sexual satisfaction, emotional fulfilment and even achievements in the workplace. Marriage was ‘increasingly required to serve the partners’ own personal development,’ reported a Home Office study in 1979, while a survey two years later found that people ranked love, mutual understanding and a healthy sex life as the most important ingredients of a happy union, well ahead of having children. Most people, however, still believed that marriage was the best vehicle to fulfil their dreams, and popular television shows abounded with images of lasting marriages, from the clearly loved-up Tom and Barbara in The Good Life to the rather more disputatious Basil and Sybil in Fawlty Towers. And only in a society that still valued marriage as the supreme sacrament would almost 28 million people have gathered around their televisions to watch the wedding of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips in November 1973 – or would almost 21 million have tuned in four years later to watch the wedding of Coronation Street’s Len Fairclough and Rita Littlewood, who were even less real than the princess and her captain.23
Yet married bliss did not always live up to its billing. Twenty years on from his fairy-tale wedding, it emerged that Captain Mark Phillips had fathered a child with a New Zealand art teacher, while Len Fairclough’s extramarital adventures only came out after his death in a car crash. And when Princess Anne and Captain Phillips were divorced in 1992, they were following in the footsteps of millions of other couples whose marriages had ended in tears and recriminations. Of course this was nothing new: in the mid-1950s there had been around 28,000 divorces a year, and there were some 40,000 in the mid-1960s. The scale, however, was different, and for that some people blamed the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, which allowed the courts to grant a divorce on the grounds of irretrievable breakdown within just two years. As with the legalization of abortion, the Act’s framers never expected that it would lead to a dramatic increase: all they wanted to do was to end what Labour’s Leo Abse called the ‘jungle of lies, half truths, miserable stratagems and ugly publicising’ that had thrived under the old system, which demanded that one party admit fault. But once the new legislation came into force, the divorce statistics went through the roof. In 1965, there had been just three divorces in Britain for every 1,000 married people. In 1970 there were almost five, by 1975 there were ten and by 1980 there were twelve. In less than two decades, in other words, the divorce rate had quadrupled, giving Britain the highest rate of marriage failure in Europe. By the end of the decade, there was one divorce for every three marriages, a statistic that filled most commentators with utter despair. What was most depressing, though, was the divorce rate among the young, which trebled in the course of the 1970s. Perhaps it was no wonder that while almost all teenagers expected they would get married, six out of ten told market researchers in 1977 that they also expected to get divorced.24
For a minority, there was nothing to fear in the rising divorce figures. ‘The nuclear family, two adults and 2.04 children, is as artificial and unnatural and against the deepest instincts of mankind as its backlash – the attempt to do without a family at all,’ wrote the Guardian’s house feminist Jill Tweedie in September 1975. Instead of shuddering at the thought of divorce, people should welcome it, she thought, for ‘divorce creates an underground family that only needs to be stripped of its coverings, its shame, its inherent drama to produce once more a natural extended family’. This rather ludicrous rose-tinted view did not, however, chime with the views of most feminists. For decades, women’s groups had actually taken a very dim view of divorce reform, arguing that it would be a ‘seducers’ charter’ that would destroy wives’ legal protections. And although by 1975 more than seven out of ten divorce petitions were filed by women, many activists insisted that the majority were wives abandoned under the new ‘Casanova’s charter’, as they called it. For abandoned wives and mothers, argued the journalist Brenda Maddox in her book The Half-Parent (1975), divorce came at a heavy emotional cost: even after the marriage was over, the two parties were haunted by the ghosts of past failures and broken relationships, their children and stepchildren daily reminders of what had been lost. And even at this relatively early stage, some commentators worried that single mothers were falling into a poverty trap, caught between the demands of their children, the regulations of the welfare system and an increasingly cut-throat labour market. The charity Gingerbread, set up in 1970 after a Sunday Times feature about a struggling single mother, made valiant efforts to lighten the burden through babysitting, collective shopping trips and support groups. But already there were far too many lone-parent families for one charity to cope with. In 1974, a single parent headed one family in eleven; by 1980, this figure had already risen to one in eight, accounting for well over a million children – and it was still growing.25
And yet despite the challenges, despite the stresses and strains of a world in which husbands and wives worked long hours and struggled to reconcile the demands of offices, homes and children, the nuclear family was a much more resilient institution than its critics imagined. It is certainly true that more people got divorced than ever before, that more people broke their wedding vows, that more children grew up without two parents and that – in overwhelming numbers – more youngsters slept and lived together before or outside marriage. But although ‘living in sin’, as it had once been called, was now widely accepted – only 8 per cent of people aged between 15 and 24 thought it was ‘wrong’ in a survey in 1980 – the idea of marriage in the abstract showed little sign of losing its fairy-tale appeal. And even after undergoing the misery and trauma of the divorce courts, the overwhelming majority still believed in the institution of marriage itself. By the end of the 1970s, almost one in three marriages involved somebody who had been married before, while eight out of ten divorcees under the age of 30 subsequently remarried. They had seen the worst that marriage had to offer, but they had not lost their faith that out there somewhere was the perfect union.26
In December 1969, a light aircraft crashed in the Belgian village of Erpen, outside Namur. The pilot, who survived, was a 36-year-old British stuntman named John Howe, and when the Belgian police investigated the crash site, they found almost 800 pornographic films, each carefully disguised in Christmas wrapping paper. Howe had been smuggling the films on behalf of the Danish firm Original Climax, which was providing them for the London market. Instead, the films ended up in a Belgian police station and Howe in a Belgian prison. It was a satisfyingly bizarre, if trivial, story, and it caught the attention of executives at the Sunday People, which had recently launched a campaign against what it saw as the excesses of the permissive society. When the People sent two veteran reporters onto the streets of Soho to uncover the network behind the West End’s booming pornography market, the trail soon led to Original Climax’s local agent, a young man in his twenties called Stuart Crispie. But when the reporters set up a sting in the Hilton hotel, the tables were abruptly turned. Far from the People exposing the ‘Blue Film Boss’, as they later called him, Crispie seemed to know exactly what they were planning. He brought along a solicitor and a stills photographer of his own, and while the lawyer was threatening the People’s men with a writ, the photographer was taking pictures to distribute across the West End. With their photos pinned up behind the counter of every sex shop in London, the reporters’ cover was well and truly blown. They had been betrayed – and the culprits, it turned out, were officers of the Metropolitan Police.27
Pornography was a relatively young industry in the early 1970s: although it had always been available to those with the money and contacts to import material from the Continent, it was only after the relaxation of the obscenity laws in 1959 that it could reach a big enough market to guarantee serious profits. Within a very short space of time, however, it was obvious that demand was very high indeed. The first home-grown magazine, Penthouse, appeared in 1964, followed by Mayfair and Fiesta two years later. By 1971, pornography was generating enough income for the entrepreneur Paul Raymond to relaunch Men Only, hitherto a rather dull pocket-sized magazine dedicated to cars, clothes, food and travel as well as ‘glamour’ pictures, as fully fledged pornography, a decision that paid handsome dividends. Naked bodies were now big business: in August 1971, the Observer’s business correspondent Raymond Palmer estimated that about 100 shops across the country were trading exclusively in explicit material, over half of them in London and most of those in Soho. Between them, he thought, the Soho stores had an annual turnover of at least £3 million, while the national total was probably around £10 million. But this was probably an underestimate. Most specialist sex shops charged gigantic mark-up prices on the materials they imported from Holland, Belgium and Scandinavia, and while small shops grossed about £1,000 a week, better-placed and bigger stores, like those dominating the streets of Soho, could expect to gross up to £10,000 – most of which, since they paid no tax, the retailers kept as profit.28
And while the performers and models themselves made very little – a participant in a blue movie might make as little as £25 – a handful of entrepreneurs did very nicely indeed. One example was the urbane Gerald Citron, the son of a washing-machine magnate, who had been educated at Repton under the headmastership of Geoffrey Fisher (later Archbishop of Canterbury) and studied law at Manchester before becoming a porn baron. By the time the police arrested him in January 1973, Citron owned a £160,000 Surrey mansion (worth at least £3 million today) with a swimming pool, an E-type Jaguar and a Rolls-Royce, had married a glamorous model, and had set up his own wine-importing business. All of this was based on the wages of sin: at his nearby farm, the police discovered 18 tons of obscene material, worth at least £500,000. But Citron was not the only man making big money from masturbation. Another Home Counties wholesaler, ‘Big Jeff’ Phillips, specialized in importing films from Denmark as well as making his own (‘filthy of course,’ he said, ‘but technically very good’). Big Jeff made enough to buy a white Rolls-Royce, two blocks of flats, houses in Esher and Kingston (evidently Surrey held a weird fascination for pornography magnates), and an £80,000 country house near Reading, complete with 10 acres of land, stables and a heated swimming pool. ‘Britain’s first blue film millionaire’, the Sunday People called him with pardonable exaggeration, living in a ‘stately home paid for with filth’. Like Citron, however, Big Jeff came to a sticky end: exposed in February 1972 during one of the paper’s periodic investigations into ‘filth’, he killed himself three years later.29
As the People had long since discovered, entrepreneurs like Citron and Phillips thrived not just because they exploited the fantasies of their fellow men, but because they had persuaded the Metropolitan Police’s Obscene Publications Squad (the notorious ‘Dirty Squad’) to turn a blind eye to their enterprises. Since the late 1960s, senior officers in the Dirty Squad had been regularly accepting bribes and sweeteners from Soho pornographers. ‘A police tariff operates in the West End,’ one investigator told the People in February 1972, ‘whereby certain police officers between them receive from the pornographic “kings” a sum in the region of £1,000 a week … paid by the “bucks” or managers of the shops either in the shop, in a club or in a pub.’ So systematic were the arrangements, in fact, that Commander Wallace Virgo alone, who controlled nine Met squads including Narcotics and Obscene Publications, was paid £500 a week plus a Christmas bonus of £2,000 between January 1970 and May 1972, as well as agreeing ‘rates’ to sanction new shops on West End sites: £1,500 for Cranbourne Street, £1,000 for D’Arblay Street, and so on. They ran ‘an evil conspiracy which turned the Obscene Publications Squad into a vast protection racket’, said Mr Justice Mars-Jones when the case finally came to court in 1977. All in all, more than a dozen policemen were convicted, and Virgo himself, the most senior officer ever found guilty of corruption, was sent down for twelve years. ‘Thank goodness, the Obscene Publications Squad has gone,’ Mars-Jones said solemnly. ‘I fear the damage you have done may be with us for a long time.’30
In fact the ‘damage’, as Mars-Jones called it, was plain for even the most casual West End visitor to see. In Soho, the obvious district for the pornographers to choose because of its cheap rents, bohemian reputation and criminal connections, it was ‘impossible not to notice the porn shops’, said one report. They were open seven days a week and twenty-four hours a day: ‘they had large neon signs declaring that they sold “BOOKS” or “ADULT BOOKS” and their windows were filled with garish displays of generally soft-core magazines and titillating notices implying – often correctly – that the interested customer would find a wider range of merchandise inside.’ Imported American magazines cost £3 each, sets of still photos £1 a pack, and ‘blue movies’ £15 for 200 feet in black and white, or £30 for colour. Meanwhile, as the journalist Paul Ferris noted, ‘under-the-counter material covered every known sexual activity’, from stories about ‘women being raped, men being dominated, [and] debauched children’ to images of flagellation, coprophilia and even people having enemas. And despite the destruction of the Dirty Squad, Soho continued to thrive: indeed, the sex trade seemed to be more successful and brazen than ever. With Westminster council refusing to crack down on the porn barons – not least because the Obscene Publications Act’s prohibition of material that was likely to ‘deprave and corrupt’ was so vague as to be useless – Soho and sex became virtually synonymous. By the end of the 1970s, the district boasted 54 sex shops, 39 ‘cinema clubs’, 16 strip and peep shows, 11 sex clubs and 12 licensed massage parlours, all packed into a tiny warren of narrow streets and run-down alleyways, and almost spilling over into more upmarket entertainment areas like Shaftesbury Avenue and Leicester Square. ‘It’s become increasing difficult to take a child to the London cinema,’ complained the Tory MP Michael Heseltine in 1975, not without reason. ‘The place is sex mad.’31
If the porn boom had been confined to the red-light ghetto of Soho, then it might not have been so alarming. In fact, by the time of Heseltine’s complaint it had already spread into almost every corner of the country: by 1975, twelve major soft-core publishers were distributing material through 400 wholesalers and an estimated 20,000 shops, most of them newsagents and corner shops. To anyone who regularly bought anything from The Times, The Economist and the Sun to Horse and Hound, the Eagle and Look-In, the sight of magazines like Mayfair, Men Only and Fiesta on the top shelf was already becoming very familiar. And although very few people admitted that they read top-shelf magazines, the sales figures were extremely good. By 1975 Men Only’s monthly readership was an estimated 1.8 million, with Mayfair and Penthouse close behind on 1.7 million each. And when, two years later, a Home Office committee chaired by the philosopher Bernard Williams was asked to look more closely into the obscenity laws, it reported that a staggering 4 million people read one or more porn magazines every month. Most readers, it turned out, were a far cry from the dirty old men of tabloid stereotypes: the majority were men under the age of 35, many of whom were married, and readership was strongest among the skilled (i.e. supposedly respectable) working classes. Since the pornographers knew their customers, no doubt this explains why the magazines of the 1970s often had an aggressively populist feel. The sleaze baron David Sullivan, for example, specialized in selling magazines that invited readers to send in explicit pictures of their wives – a self-consciously democratic approach that saved money on models and also made him enormously rich. What Sullivan also realized, though, was that once the legal shackles were off, many readers would demand more and more hard-core material. ‘Strength sells,’ he told a documentary in 1977 – and curiously, it sold even better when the models literally were the girls next door.32
By far the most popular source of soft-core images, however, could be found on newsagents’ bottom shelves, not the top ones. Ever since the Sun had been relaunched as an aggressively downmarket working-class tabloid under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch and the editorship of Larry Lamb, it had gone out of its way to emphasize sex. ‘Sex was news. The paper did not invent it,’ Lamb later insisted. ‘Discussion of sexual matters had become publicly acceptable, therefore the paper had a duty to publish it, with taste, and a sense of proportion.’ In many ways he was quite right: the paper’s endless stream of stories about love-nests and sex romps conformed absolutely to the bawdy music-hall tradition that saw sex as both fun and funny, as long as people stuck within a conservative moral framework. The quintessential example, of course, was the Page Three topless pin-up, which first appeared in November 1970 in the form of a ‘birthday suit girl’ to celebrate the first anniversary of the paper’s relaunch. The next Page Three girl, however, did not appear until the following March, and only in 1972 did the topless picture became a regular feature. Revealingly, however, the pictures often ran alongside stories about ‘family breakdown and domestic and sexual violence’: as one academic study remarks, the rather incongruous juxtaposition allowed the Sun both to endorse permissiveness and to distance itself from it. What was also revealing was that in the early 1970s very few of the models were white British women. Many were Swedes and Germans, supposedly much more liberated where sex was concerned, and there were also plenty of black women, to whom nudity supposedly came naturally. So in July 1972, when the Sun decided to celebrate the fact that Britain was overcoming prejudice and ‘Winning the Race War’, the high point was a week of black models. ‘The shape of race relations gets a real uplift from Guyana-born model Minerva Smith!’ one caption claimed.33
Needless to say, not everyone was delighted by the appearance of girls like Minerva Smith. Even before the introduction of Page Three, in fact, the Sun had been banned from one Yorkshire town’s public library because there was too much sex in it, prompting the paper to launch an attack on the ‘Silly Burghers of Sowerby Bridge’ (‘We should have been thrown out of better places than this’). And although feminists made no secret of their loathing for the paper, the Sun’s executives were much more interested in their booming circulation figures. By 1975, when the Mirror felt obliged to follow suit with topless pictures of its own, the two papers were virtually neck and neck, and at the beginning of 1978 the Sun finally drew ahead. As the former Sun journalist-turned-critic Roy Greenslade puts it, this was ‘an astonishing achievement: in the space of just nine years, the Sun had risen from almost the bottom of the tabloid heap to the top’. Topless women were not the only reason; but as the most obvious symbols of the Sun’s blend of sex, censoriousness, populism and permissiveness, they had a lot to do with it.34
The deeper importance of Page Three, though, is that it was the most obvious example of what one historian calls the ‘eroticisation’ of British life in the 1970s, something visible not just in the strip-clubs and sex shops of Soho, but in mainstream news reports, in cinemas, in paperback bestsellers and even on the television screens. In fashion, for example, men’s trousers were often crotch-bulgingly tight, while young women now saw nothing wrong in revealing great expanses of cleavage or thigh. In advertising, too, there was now a much heavier emphasis on sexual suggestiveness. And although the blatant smut of Benny Hill’s annual Thames Television spectaculars, with their apparently unvarying cast of nubile young women in bikinis and suspenders, owed something to the bawdy traditions of the music hall, it represented something new on television, something that many middle-class families had never seen before. Even mainstream sitcoms now joked openly about pornography: in the very first episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973), Terry Collier complains that, having served in the army in West Germany, he has missed out on ‘the death of censorship’, ‘the new morality’, Oh! Calcutta! and ‘topless waitresses in frilly knickers’. The first thing he does on being demobbed is to visit a seedy strip-club, where he almost bumps into his old friend Bob, a faithful husband-to-be who nevertheless bunks off to Soho when he gets the chance. Even ten years before, such a scene would have been unthinkable at prime time on BBC1; by 1973, however, it was nothing remarkable. Indeed, it was a measure of how far pornography had permeated the commercial mainstream that Bob and Terry might well have bumped into an up-and-coming popular detective at the Soho strip-club, for in Colin Dexter’s novel Last Seen Wearing (1977) we discover that Inspector Morse has more than a passing acquaintance with the West End scene. In one club, he and Lewis sit through moribund performances by Fabulous Fiona, Sexy Susan and Sensational Sandra, before Voluptuous Vera and Kinky Kate manage ‘to raise the general standard of the entertainment’. ‘There were gimmicks aplenty,’ we are told; ‘fans, whips, bananas and rubber spiders’, and Morse digs his colleague in the ribs as ‘an extraordinarily shapely girl, dressed for a fancy-dressing ball, titillatingly and tantalizingly divested herself of all but an incongruously ugly mask.’ ‘Bit of class there, Lewis,’ Morse says admiringly.35
What one cultural critic calls the spread of ‘permissive populism’ – ‘the trickle-down of permissiveness into commodity culture’ – was particularly noticeable in the film industry. The astonishing collapse of cinema-going as mass entertainment, with weekly audiences having fallen from a third of the population to just two in a hundred people between the late 1940s and the early 1970s, meant that studios were desperate for any gimmick that would drag people away from the television, and sex seemed the ideal candidate. Under the leadership of John Trevelyan, the British Board of Film Classification had moved steadily towards a position of greater permissiveness, particularly where so-called ‘art’ films were concerned, and the introduction of a new classification system – in particular, the AA category for those aged 14 and older, and X for those 18 and older – seemed an invitation to produce more explicit material. What was more, the system was full of loopholes. If a film was denied a BBFC certificate, it could be submitted for a licence to individual local authorities, some of which took a decidedly permissive line. In October 1970, for example, after the film version of Henry Miller’s novel Tropic of Cancer had been rejected by the BBFC, it was promptly given a licence by the Greater London Council, much to the horror of the Conservative press. And with family audiences in deep decline, many cinemas – especially in big cities – decided that only ever more adult material would guarantee ticket sales. By April 1971, when the Evening Standard published a major investigation of film-going in London, no fewer than 31 out of 60 films showing in the capital had X certificates, with a further 12 being ranked as AA, 5 as A (suitable for older children) and just 12 as U. Among the X films, the paper noted, ‘nudity had become commonplace, full-frontal female nudity was almost so, full-frontal male nudity becoming so’. Half of the films either depicted or referred to homosexuality, and a quarter depicted or implied masturbation. Perhaps it was no wonder that only four months before, John Trevelyan had decided to throw in the towel. ‘I am simply sickened’, he said, ‘by having to put in days filled from dawn till dusk with the sight and sound of human copulation.’36
Given what happened next, Trevelyan was probably wise to get out when he did. Almost as soon as his successor, a shy, chain-smoking Scottish TV executive called Stephen Murphy, had moved in, he found himself embroiled in a blazing tabloid row about Ken Russell’s wildly overwrought film The Devils, a story about witchcraft in seventeenth-century France, complete with enough torture, madness and sexual obsession to satisfy even the most jaded palate. After months of negotiations between the director, the studio and the BBFC, the film came out in July 1971; but although Warner Bros. had taken out scenes of nuns sexually assaulting a statue of Christ and Vanessa Redgrave masturbating with a dead priest’s charred bone, what remained was bound to inflame conservative critics. ‘Redgrave’s perverse Mother Superior licks the stigmata of her lover who is represented as a crucified Christ figure,’ wrote the Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker. ‘Impromptu medical examinations are performed on the altar table; nude nuns massage phallic candles with lubricious relish; hot-water enemas are applied in a brutal pantomime of purgation; and the vomit of those accused of being possessed by the devil is picked through in the hope of discovering a crumb of undigested demon.’ Not altogether surprisingly, seventeen local authorities banned the film, and in London the GLC committee decided against a ban, which would have destroyed the film’s box-office prospects, by only three votes. But this was only the beginning of the biggest censorship row in British film history.37
For all its excesses, The Devils had been enormously unlucky. It went on general release at the exact moment that conservative moralists and Christian groups were launching a campaign against the ‘ravages of permissiveness’, and at a point when, with both crime and unemployment mounting, the press was becoming increasingly agitated about the moral state of the nation. What this meant was that the next major release was bound to face even more intense scrutiny, and unfortunately for Stephen Murphy the film in question was Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, the story of a middle-class couple besieged by rapacious yokels in a Cornish cottage, and an extremely violent picture by any standards. As Walker later wrote, Straw Dogs was ‘putting on indecent display all the nightmares that could affect the British bourgeoisie’, and to many critics the scenes of sexual violence – including the savage double rape of Susan George, haplessly re-edited by the studio so that it appeared she was being buggered and, crucially, was enjoying it – were simply disgusting. And when Murphy defended it as ‘a brilliant but brutal film that says something important’, the press turned on him. On 17 December, The Times published an unprecedented letter from thirteen leading reviewers, including its own John Russell Taylor, Dilys Powell of the Sunday Times, Derek Malcolm of the Guardian and John Coleman of the New Statesman, as well as Walker himself. ‘The use to which this film employs its scenes of double rape and multiple killing by a variety of hideous methods’, they wrote, ‘is dubious in its intention, excessive in its effect and likely to contribute to the concern expressed from time to time by many critics over films which exploit the very violence which they make a show of condemning.’ For some of the critics, the decision to pass Straw Dogs cast a shadow not only over Murphy’s survival as chief censor, but over the ‘continued existence’ of the BBFC itself.38
Although Murphy wrote a robust reply defending his censorship policy, he must have regretted that he had ever taken the job in the first place – for as he well knew, an even more contentious picture was coming in January 1972. With its shocking portrait of juvenile delinquency, rape and violence in a nightmarish future London, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novella A Clockwork Orange would probably have stirred controversy whenever it was released. But this was the worst possible time for Murphy to have passed such a disturbing picture, since, as Alexander Walker later remarked, public opinion was ‘waiting for it’, with the newspapers ‘ready and indeed willing to be outraged’ before anyone had even seen it. Even before the film’s premiere on 13 January 1972, the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, told the press that there was ‘a new film out this week that I think I ought to go and see … If things are being shown which one could reasonably suppose are contributing to the degree of violence, I think I ought to know.’ In the event, Maudling watched the film at a special screening and then, as was his wont, did absolutely nothing about it. But his intervention had stoked the flames even higher.39
As a terrifying vision of utopian modernism gone wrong, teenage thugs running amok in a world of concrete tower blocks and a repressive government struggling to keep the lid on a broken society, A Clockwork Orange could hardly have appeared at a more appropriate moment. By the time of its premiere, the miners’ strike was just days old, while the papers were full of angst at the spectacle of one million unemployed and the mounting bloodshed in Northern Ireland. In this context, Kubrick’s stylized hooligans became the focus for a moral backlash of unparalleled intensity. For the Sun, it was the ‘FILM SHOCKER TO END THEM ALL … unparalleled in its concentrated parade of violence, viciousness and cruelty’, while the Mail’s critic Cecil Wilson wondered ‘what on earth [had] induced our censors to pass those startling scenes of rape and violence’. Even left-wing politicians joined the bandwagon: after a special screening for peers and MPs, Labour’s Maurice Edelman, chairman of the all-party Film Committee, told the press that ‘the film stimulates for two and a half hours an appetite for sadistic violence with the instantaneous communication which the visual arts uniquely offer’. When A Clockwork Orange went on general release, Edelman predicted, ‘it will lead to a Clockwork cult which will magnify teenage violence’.40
Amid the hysteria, Stephen Murphy’s argument that the film was ‘in its stylised way, simply a vehicle for all kinds of speculation about the human spirit’ and ‘a valuable contribution to the whole debate about violence’ was totally ignored. Instead, critics queued up to denounce Kubrick, Burgess and the BBFC, with A Clockwork Orange becoming a scapegoat for all the ills – crime, pornography, strikes, the stream of national humiliations – that seemed to be corrupting the national spirit. Across the country, local authorities delayed the film’s opening, demanded more cuts or even imposed outright bans. Murphy himself was now under intense pressure to step down: he was ‘out of touch with public opinion’, according to the head of the Cinematograph Exhibitors Association, while an editorial in The Times asked ‘Is Film Censorship Breaking Down?’ At one stage, the pressure on the chief censor was such that, with the press camped outside his Soho Square office, he took refuge in a nearby Catholic church. In the end, he managed to tough it out: as one sympathetic journalist observed, he had ‘had a most unfortunate baptism into a job which he himself has said is impossible’. But the controversy had taken its toll on a sensitive and conscientious man: at the beginning of 1975, after just four years, Murphy resigned to return to the Independent Broadcasting Authority.41
By the time Murphy stepped down, A Clockwork Orange had been withdrawn from cinemas anyway. Although Warner Bros. had restricted it to just one West End cinema for the first twelve months, an unprecedented step aimed at dampening the criticism, it had done no good. In the end, the press campaign proved too much for Stanley Kubrick: after allegations that his film had inspired the murder of a tramp in Buckinghamshire, he ordered that it be withdrawn from circulation, and it disappeared from British cinemas for the next two decades. But sex and violence did not disappear from the silver screen, for with audiences in free-fall, what remained of the British film industry had come to the conclusion that only more and more sensational material would get people back in. And by the time of Murphy’s resignation, cinemas were increasingly dominated either by American imports or by perhaps the most embarrassing British cultural products of the decade – the sex comedies typified by Robin Askwith’s Confessions films. Between 1971 and 1975, studios pumped out a staggering forty-three examples, from Secrets of a Door-to-Door Salesman and Can You Keep it Up for a Week? to Confessions of a Driving Instructor and Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate. The titles were almost beyond parody, though thankfully nobody had the courage to make Confessions of an Academic.
Tens, even hundreds of thousands of people paid good money to see these alleged comedies: indeed, without them, the British film industry would have virtually disappeared, and many ran in provincial cinemas for months on end. The funniest thing about them was the violence of the reviews: one critic thought that Confessions of a Window Cleaner should be renamed Confessions of the British: What They Don’t Know about Making Films, Making Erotic Images, Making People Laugh and Making Love. In some ways, of course, their success reflected the relative severity of the censorship regime, which was still much harsher than those on the Continent: if provincial cinemas had offered genuinely explicit fare, then people would surely not have wasted their money watching Robin Askwith leering through a suburban bedroom window. But they also tapped a rich seam of bawdy vulgarity in British working-class humour, a prurient fascination with nudity and an almost obsessive affection for jokes about breasts and bottoms. Revealingly, the publicity for the Confessions films insisted that they were quintessentially British, part of ‘the long tradition in entertainment in this country of good, naughty laughter – from double entendres in the music hall (Max Miller is a prime example) to seaside postcards, from West End stage farces (e.g. Robertson Hare) to the “Carry On” films’. Indeed, the world of the films – a world of perky, carefree housewives and lecherous young men, of suburban sex romps and ever-available dolly birds – was instantly familiar to anybody who had ever opened a copy of the Sun. And Askwith himself briefly became a cult hero to Sun readers – ‘Randy Robin’, as the paper called him, an expelled public schoolboy turned bawdy working-class hero, a former Queen’s Park Rangers youth footballer who now made a living ‘bonking birds’ – or at least pretending to.42
And yet for all the talk about bawdy traditions and a rich vein of naughtiness, the Confessions films would never have succeeded had they not seemed to offer something new. Just fifteen or even ten years earlier, a mainstream film with such explicit sexual content would have been simply unthinkable, but now they were merely part of a cultural landscape in which even the BBC, perhaps Britain’s most venerated institution, the national church of the airwaves, made no apology for scenes of female nudity and utter sexual debauchery. In the justly acclaimed I, Claudius (1976), for example, audiences even got to watch the Emperor Caligula organizing orgies in which senators’ wives are auctioned off to the highest bidder, or Claudius’s wife Messalina conducting a love-making competition with the prostitute Scylla. In the same year, ITV showed A Bouquet of Barbed Wire, the story of incestuous passions and a taste for sado-masochism tearing a family apart, adapted from Andrea Newman’s novel. By the end, as the Observer’s Clive James put it at the time, ‘everybody had been to bed with everybody else except the baby’. Even in detective fiction, hitherto one of the most conservative of genres, there was no escape. In Ruth Rendell’s A Guilty Thing Surprised (1970), the plot turns on an incestuous relationship; in P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), a male student is found hanging by his belt, ‘dressed like a woman, in a black bra and black lace panties’; in Julian Symons’s The Players and the Game (1972), one man pays to be humiliated by prostitutes while another molests a 13-year-old girl; and in Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels, which began to appear in 1975, sex, pornography and general seediness are inevitably discovered beneath the veneer of Oxford gentility. As the writer Alwyn Turner remarks, the world of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple must have seemed like ancient history.43
For some observers, the pornography boom of the early 1970s seemed a great and noble thing. Among the tiny handful of largely middle-class and very well-educated youngsters who made up the bohemian counterculture, obscenity was a way of challenging the dominant assumptions of ‘square’ or ‘bourgeois’ society. Like overgrown adolescents everywhere, they were obsessed both by sex and by shocking their elders: as the playwright Joe Orton told his lover (and later murderer) Kenneth Halliwell in 1967, sex was ‘the only way to smash up the wretched civilisation … Much more fucking and they’ll be screaming hysterics in next to no time.’ The same principle – which was, of course, completely misguided – informed many of the underground publications of the day, from Richard Neville’s infantile and grotesquely misogynistic hippy manifesto Play Power (1970), in which he enthused about the benefits of a ‘hurricane fuck’ with a 14-year-old girl, to the equally infantile and equally misogynistic ‘School Kids Issue’ of the magazine Oz, which was published in April 1970 and became the subject of a protracted but ultimately inconsequential Old Bailey trial a year later. But although the underground rapidly imploded – indeed, virtually the only trace of it left by 1974 was the listings magazine Time Out – its attitudes survived, especially in sections of the academic and media worlds. When Malcolm Bradbury’s loathsome protagonist Howard Kirk takes up his new job at Watermouth University, he soon falls into conversation with the vice- chancellor, a ‘radical educationalist, former political scientist [and] well-known Labour voter’, about a subject Howard is ‘greatly interested in, the social benefits and purgative value of pornography in the cinema’. ‘I’ve always been a serious supporter of pornography, Dr Kirk,’ the vice-chancellor says earnestly – and at his words, the narrator tells us, ‘Howard warmed, and felt at ease.’44
Most people, however, had rather more conflicted attitudes to the rise of sexual frankness and new availability of pornography. When the Tottenham football squad took the train up to Wolverhampton for the first match of the season in August 1971, their pile of magazines included a copy of Penthouse, from which the full back Cyril Knowles delightedly read aloud before throwing it aside with the words: ‘Disgusting. They ought to ban them. I feel right degraded. Any more?’ He was only joking, of course, but plenty of people did think that pornography was disgusting. For many feminists, for example, it represented a travesty of their faith in sexual liberation, turning women into nothing more than glorified sex objects. And although polls showed that the vast majority of the public took a remarkably liberal view of pornography – in 1973, three out of four people agreed that ‘adults should be able to buy whatever indecent erotic books and magazines they like, so long as they are not on public display’ – a large minority of the population, many of them older women, saw things very differently.45
For many people, indeed, pornography had replaced prostitution (which had been driven underground after the Wolfenden report in 1955) as the chief ‘moral stain’ on the national flag. Just as moral campaigners had inveighed against the vice of prostitution in the late nineteenth century or the early 1950s, now pornography was seen as the supreme symbol of Britain’s ethical degeneration, ‘the final desecration and commercialisation of sex … a manifestation of decay, a canker at the heart of respectability’. For the country’s best-known moral conservative, Mary Whitehouse, who had been campaigning to ‘clean up’ television since the early 1960s, pornography was ‘filthy’, ‘sinful’, ‘depraved’ and ‘perverted’. And in January 1976, contemplating the spread of violent and sadomasochistic imagery, even The Times reassessed its previously liberal editorial position. ‘Against this pornography of cruelty we need a defence,’ the paper said; ‘otherwise we may be brainwashed into accepting it, not only in books and magazines, but, as already to a dangerous extent, in newspapers, films and on television … The pornographers are sick-minded commercial men who sell images of hatred, and particularly of hatred of women, for vast profit. We need both a law and a law-enforcement which stops them.’46
Oddly enough, the figure most associated with both the pornography boom and the backlash against it was not a prototypical porn star such as Fiona Richmond or Mary Millington, but an elderly peer with an unrivalled reputation as an endlessly well-meaning do-gooder of semi-comic proportions. As a veteran of both the Attlee and the Wilson governments, a crusader for unfashionable causes and a tireless campaigner for penal reform, Lord Longford was one of Britain’s best-known aristocratic socialists, a passionate, deeply religious but ultimately scatty figure who seemed oblivious to the ridicule his escapades attracted from the media. He first made the issue his own in April 1971 when, having initiated a debate in the Lords about the ‘incipient menace of pornography in Great Britain’, he invited the press to accompany him on a tour of Soho’s sleaziest establishments. These included a ‘sex supermarket’, various seedy cinemas and a strip-club called the Soho Stokehole, where Longford solemnly watched a girl whipping off her knickers to reveal what one reporter called ‘nothing so startlingly out of the ordinary as to justify the long preliminary posturings’. Ridiculous as it was, however, Longford’s Soho excursion paled by comparison with his next expedition, which saw him fly to Copenhagen on behalf of an unofficial fifty-two-member ‘commission’ on pornography and violence, which he saw as ‘a chance to work out a coherent policy of resistance’ to the tide of obscenity. To the press, however, the fact that the commission’s members included Jimmy Savile and Cliff Richard, as well as Kingsley Amis, hardly a paragon of sexual sobriety, lent it an unwittingly farcical air. In his own mind, Longford was a brave crusader for decent moral values; to the Sun, however, he was simply ‘Lord Porn.’47
In an era when the headlines seemed all too often to be dominated by reports of strikes, terrorism and economic disasters, Longford’s expedition to Denmark in August 1971 came as welcome light relief. He was joined on the trip not only by five other commission members, most notably the former Oxford Union president and future teddy-bear collector, puzzle-book compiler and European Monopoly champion Gyles Brandreth, but by members of the press corps, who treated him with scarcely concealed hilarity. The trip kicked off with a visit to two Copenhagen sex shows, in which women were paired with men, other women and animals, but Longford found it all rather too much. He only lasted five minutes in the first club, walking out in disgust with the manager trailing behind him saying: ‘But sir, you have not seen the intercourse. We have intercourse later in the programme.’ The second club was even worse. Here, according to an amused reporter, ‘a half naked girl thrust a whip into Lord Longford’s hand and invited him to flagellate her. He declined and after she had playfully mauled him by thrusting the whip around his neck and pulling violently on it, he got up and left.’ By contrast, his colleagues stuck it out rather longer, were much less shocked, and disagreed with Longford’s verdict that this kind of thing was likely to encourage sexual violence. Brandreth even announced that he would like to see the Danish laws introduced at home. Not surprisingly, this all made splendid reading, but it also made it hard for people to take Longford seriously. When his report finally came out in September 1972, much of the press treated it with open disdain, while the Heath government summarily rejected his calls for a more precise definition of obscenity to include anything that outraged ‘contemporary standards of decency or humanity accepted by the public at large’. In fact, Longford’s recommendations were reasonably sensible and well intentioned, if rather too vague, but forever lurking at the back of readers’ minds must have been the image of the elderly peer being strangled with a whip in the clubs of Copenhagen.48
Despite its ridiculous tone, Longford’s investigation reflected a broader sense in the early years of the decade that cultural change and sexual frankness had gone too far, a gathering undercurrent of moral unease running through the heart of British society. It was at the very beginning of the 1970s, for example, that politicians and pundits alike first began to debate ‘permissiveness’, a word almost always used pejoratively, knitting together a host of related anxieties from pornography and promiscuity to supposedly lax sentences for criminals and falling standards in education. Permissiveness had become a ‘political metaphor’, and from this point on, protecting the embattled family was at the heart of conservative rhetoric. One account traces this as far back as 1966, when the newspapers were full of angst about the horrifying Moors murders. In any case, by 1970 ‘the language of crime, violence, chaos, anarchy’ was becoming very common in the Tory press. In January 1970, for example, Edward Heath’s future Lord Chancellor Quintin Hogg insisted that rising crime ‘cannot be separated from private dishonesty or public demonstration in defiance of law’, and warned that ‘the permissive and lawless society is a by-product of Socialism’. A year later, the journal of Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association sounded a remarkably similar theme, claiming that ‘obscenity in the paperbacks and magazines and on the motion picture screen is a basic and contributing factor to violence’. ‘The “Permissive Society”, with its much vaunted “freedom”, is now seen for what it is – a bitter and destructive thing,’ insisted the Autumn 1971 issue of Viewers and Listeners. ‘The arts are degraded, law is held in contempt and sport fouled by outbreaks of vandalism and violence. The national purse takes the strain of a health service overburdened with increasing abortion, drug addiction, mental disturbance, alcoholism and an epidemic of venereal disease.’49
By and large, however, most senior politicians hesitated to touch the issue of permissiveness during the Heath years. Economic affairs naturally dominated Westminster debates, and although the Wilson government had been instrumental in supporting the private members’ bills that decriminalized homosexuality and legalized abortion in the late 1960s, many Labour MPs remained deeply ambivalent, even uneasy, about the so-called permissive society – which was hardly surprising given the cultural conservatism of traditional working-class Labour voters. Perhaps more surprisingly, on the right there seemed relatively little appetite for the kind of ‘culture-war’ politics that was becoming popular in the United States; indeed, in keeping with his buttoned-up image, Edward Heath barely mentioned cultural or moral issues at all. At the Home Office, meanwhile, Reginald Maudling seemed completely indifferent to the murmurs of discontent from the shires, striking a pose of ‘civilised, tolerant weariness and cynicism’. By most standards, in fact, he was a much more liberal Home Secretary than his predecessor, Labour’s bluff ‘PC Jim’ Callaghan. ‘The object of a civilised society’, he remarked in 1971, ‘should be the maximum of freedom as long as the freedom of others is not infringed.’ Despite all the fuss about Longford’s report, for example, Maudling could not even be bothered to read it, and he showed not the slightest inclination to crack down on obscenity, writing in his memoirs that ‘if one adult wishes to write a book or produce a play and show it to other adults, and they wish to see it, what right has the State to object?’ Even drugs did not particularly bother him: in unguarded moments Maudling sometimes told friends that he thought cannabis ought to be legalized, while his teenage sons allegedly smoked dope at parties in his official residence, Admiralty House. If any of this had reached the Tory grass roots, of course, Maudling might well have been finished. But this was an age in which not even the Tory leader gave much thought to the anxieties of his activists, and in this respect Maudling’s indifference to popular prejudice was typical not just of Heath’s government, but of the liberal consensus that had dominated public affairs since the early 1960s.50
Ignoring the issue, however, did not make it go away, and since the politicians refused to lead, others stepped forward. In October 1969, a London doctor, Stanley Ellison, had written to The Times calling for a mass effort ‘to resist the destructive and demoralizing trends in our present community’, explaining that ‘the stability of the traditional British way of life is threatened. Venereal disease is increasing. Termination of pregnancy is increasing. Drug addiction is increasing. Smoking is increasing. Gambling is increasing. All being examples of anti-social behaviour.’ To Ellison, a ‘tide of immorality, self-deception, and insatiable appetite for all that is worthless’ was sweeping over the land, and it seemed that plenty of readers agreed: within just a few days he had received more than 200 letters of support, and in June 1971 he joined other doctors and educationalists to set up the Responsible Society. In their opening statement, they explained that while they welcomed the ‘greater frankness and tolerance’ that now surrounded sex, they were increasingly worried about the ‘suffering and social damage which is the direct consequence of an increasingly irresponsible attitude to sex … encouraged by an unholy alliance of commercial sex-exploiters and “progressive” protagonists of sexual anarchy’. The Responsible Society, therefore, would ‘combat the commercialization and trivialization of sex’ – largely, they explained, through setting the facts before the public. ‘We are not killjoys,’ added Dr Anne Williams, an applied geneticist on the governing board of the society. ‘I am not against sex or sex education … I believe sex should be part of a stable, loving society. We need, too, stable homes in which to bring up our children.’51
Since the Responsible Society’s tone seemed so measured, it was not surprising that it immediately attracted an admiring editorial in The Times, which concluded, in its habitual wishy-washy style, that ‘the more permissive sexual life of adults … has to be reconciled with the need of children for stability’ (a view with which no sane person could conceivably have disagreed). The problem, though, was that a relatively measured tone was no good way to attract recruits, and within twelve months the Responsible Society’s rhetoric and opposition to sex education had become notably more strident. In fact, many of the pressure groups that sprang up to fight permissiveness in the 1960s and 1970s were avowedly religious, even evangelical in spirit, appealing to middle-class churchgoers who wanted to fight the increasing secularization of society. As a wholly secular group, however, the Responsible Society was at a disadvantage, and by 1978 it had only 719 members. Revealingly, only 7 per cent of them were under 30 while no fewer than 58 per cent were in their fifties or older. Still, some groups were even smaller: the Community Standards Association, founded in Cornwall in 1974 to mobilize public opinion against ‘mental and moral pollution’, had just 300 members by the late 1970s. But unlike many of its competitors, the Responsible Society kept going: four decades on, it was still fighting the good fight against teenage pregnancy, sex education and morning-after pills, in the guise of the Family Education Trust.52
While the Responsible Society never aspired to become a mass-membership organization, another anti-permissive group formed at almost exactly the same time made a determined effort to attract thousands of recruits. In November 1970 a young couple, Peter and Janet Hill, had returned to Britain after four years abroad. Both committed Baptists, they had been working in India for an evangelical youth group, but almost as soon as they set foot on their native soil, they realized that they had been trying to spread the Gospel in the wrong country. Astounded by what he called the ‘moral slide’ of British society in just four years, which was characterized by the spread of pornography and the apparent media obsession with sex, Peter Hill had a vision of ‘thousands of young people marching as witnesses’ to the truth of the Bible’s moral teachings. In early 1971, he made contact with various like-minded people, from the Clean-Up TV campaigner Mary Whitehouse and the satirist-turned-born-again-Christian Malcolm Muggeridge to the Bishop of Blackburn and the housewives’ favourite, Cliff Richard. And by the summer he had established an eclectic steering committee, including a flying missionary, a shop-steward-turned-vicar and the general secretary of the Evangelical Alliance, and had also secured the support of various Anglican, Baptist and Pentecostal church groups. Both Muggeridge and Whitehouse, who were well-known television personalities with a substantial conservative following, pledged their support, and Muggeridge, with the journalist’s gift for a telling phrase, came up with a name for their new movement: the Nationwide Festival of Light. In July, Hill announced plans for a rally in Trafalgar Square, a gospel festival in Hyde Park, a national day of prayer and the lighting of beacons across the country to ‘alert Britain to the dangers of moral pollution which are now eroding the moral fibre of this once great nation’. The Festival would be a chance, Muggeridge added, to take back the cultural initiative from ‘those who for one reason or another favour our present Gadarene slide into decadence and godlessness. It is high time others made their voices heard.’53
In many ways, the involvement of Muggeridge and Whitehouse in the Festival of Light was a very mixed blessing. While it secured all the publicity the organizers could possibly want, it also gave their movement a splenetic, even cranky air, and ensured that it would face plenty of mockery in the media. The campaign’s official launch in Westminster Hall on 8 September 1971, for example, was something of a disaster. Although some 4,000 people turned up, the proceedings were interrupted by at least 80 demonstrators, many of them from the Gay Liberation Front (including the young Peter Tatchell) and some of them dressed as nuns. Amid extraordinary scenes of shouting and struggling, the respected anti-apartheid activist and Bishop of Stepney, Trevor Huddleston, had to abandon his prepared remarks attacking pornography. Instead it was Muggeridge who dominated the stage, melodramatically telling the audience that the tide of permissiveness was a ‘devil’s arc reaching from the gutter to more rarefied and sanctimonious regions’. And this rather embarrassing beginning set the tone for the Festival’s next major event, a rally in Trafalgar Square two weeks later. Muggeridge confidently predicted that 100,000 people would turn up; instead, probably less than half did so, most of them young members of Baptist and other evangelical churches. Prince Charles sent a message of good luck, but the media again concentrated on the tension between the crowd and counter-demonstrators, among them GLF members armed with stink bombs. Muggeridge was so incensed that afterwards he completely lost his temper, telling the editor of the Radio Four’s World at One and The World This Weekend – an old friend and committed Catholic – that he had ‘a growing feeling of revulsion for the programmes you edit’. ‘In a time of moral crisis we’re on different sides,’ Muggeridge added, ‘so much so that I consider all personal relations between us now being at an end.’54
In fact, despite the ludicrous scenes in central London and Muggeridge’s intemperate reaction, the Festival of Light was a considerable grass-roots success. Outside London, the movement organized dozens of ‘Land Aflame’ rallies, attracting, they claimed, a total of 215,000 people. In Blackburn, 10,000 people joined the local bishop and chief constable on a march for ‘decency’; in Bristol, a special service in the cathedral was filled to capacity; in Sheffield, hundreds watched as none other than Cliff Richard lit a beacon, one of about 300 across the country. As far as evangelical groups were concerned, this was a moment of unprecedented unity and solidarity; indeed, it stands as a landmark in the history of inter-denominational cooperation, with Catholics and evangelical Protestants joining hands to protest against the ‘corruption’ of modern morals. And while the Festival of Light eventually faded from the headlines, it never went away. By the end of the decade it was still campaigning for ‘love, purity and family life’ and against ‘destructive influences in contemporary culture’, and a small team distributed 15,000 copies of a quarterly newsletter through grass-roots Christian and conservative organizations. It did not turn back the tide of pornography and permissiveness, of course. But it clearly appealed to thousands of people, predominantly middle-class churchgoers, who felt frightened and alienated by the cultural changes that were sweeping over Britain in the 1970s – people like A. R. Reynolds of Hereford, who told The Times that they were ‘ordinary responsible people collectively calling a halt to those who are imposing on us standards of behaviour which take away dignity and decency’. ‘We all know what happens to a family when self and mutual respect is lost,’ he added; ‘it is the crucial step towards break-up of the family. The same applies to a nation.’55
To people like Mr Reynolds, the true standard-bearer of the anti-permissive movement was neither Longford, the socialist peer, nor Muggeridge, the satirist-turned-moralist. It was the former senior mistress at Madeley School for Girls in Shropshire, a deeply religious woman who presented herself as an ordinary wife and mother and yet had become one of the most familiar faces in the country, her polite Midlands voice belying a passionate sense of moral mission. Ever since 1964, when she had launched the Clean-Up TV movement at a mass meeting in Birmingham Town Hall, Mary Whitehouse had come in for unrelenting mockery from her critics. The extravagantly mustachioed Conservative backbencher Sir Gerald Nabarro publicly called her a ‘hypocritical old bitch’; the young Sunday Times columnist Jilly Cooper called her ‘sinister and chilling’; the former director general of the BBC, Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, reportedly kept a nude cartoon of her with (oddly) five breasts, and used to amuse himself by throwing darts at it. In one episode of The Goodies she is lampooned as Desiree Carthorse, head of the Keep Filth Off Television Campaign, who enlists the Goodies to make a sex education film (‘How to Make Babies While Doing Dirty Things’); in Till Death Us Do Part, Alf Garnett admiringly reads her book Cleaning Up TV, which Mike and Rita later ceremonially burn while chanting ‘Unclean, unclean’. And all the time she was bombarded with hate mail, with threatening telephone calls and abusive letters. She even complained that her sons had been invited to orgies on the pretence that they were Christmas parties.56
And yet even as the attacks kept on coming, Whitehouse never gave up. In an age when female politicians were still extremely rare, with Barbara Castle, Margaret Thatcher and Shirley Williams the only well-known examples, she was rarely out of the headlines, ‘the model of a moral entrepreneur’. In one typical week in the mid-1970s, she spent Monday running her pressure group, the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, before addressing a meeting in the Midlands. The next day she drove to Sheffield for a debate at the university; on Wednesday she drove down to London to appear on the BBC’s Woman’s Hour; on Thursday she drove to South Wales for a television interview in Cardiff and a talk at a Methodist church hall in Merthyr Tydfil; on Friday, she had to go back down to Cardiff at short notice for yet another television discussion. All the time she hammered home the same message that had animated her very first manifesto back in January 1964. ‘We women of Britain believe in a Christian way of life,’ it began, demanding ‘the right to bring up our own children in the truths of the Christian faith, and to protect our homes from the exhibitions of violence’. And although her targets included plays, newspapers, films and novels, one loomed larger than any other: the BBC, which she accused of peddling ‘the propaganda of disbelief, doubt and dirt’ and celebrating ‘promiscuity, infidelity and drinking’. People watched the BBC, Whitehouse said, ‘at the risk of serious damage to their morals, their patriotism, their discipline and their family life’.57
To Whitehouse’s critics, the obvious explanation for her campaign was that she was simply a crank, a self-appointed censor who wanted to turn back the clock to some imaginary paradise of church choirs and happy families. And in truth she often handed the scoffers all the ammunition they could want. Objecting to Till Death Us Do Part, for example, she took issue not with Alf’s racism or his reactionary opinions, but his language, sitting with a pen and paper to note down the ‘121 bloodies in half an hour’. Whereas most people found the Irish comedian Dave Allen, a great BBC favourite in the 1970s, gentle and rueful, she found him ‘offensive, indecent and embarrassing’, largely because he poked fun at the Catholic Church. At a meeting with the BBC chairman Sir Michael Swann in January 1974 – the very existence of which testified to her impact – she singled out the inoffensive sitcoms Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, claiming that they were guilty of repeated sexual innuendos (‘It seemed that the male sex organ’, she said unselfconsciously, ‘was the in thing’). Not even pop music was safe from her scrutiny: when Alice Cooper’s raucous ‘School’s Out’ reached number one in August 1972, she sent a furious letter to the producer of Top of the Pops. ‘You will hear that the lyrics contain the following chorus – “Got no principles, got no innocence; School’s out for Summer, School’s out for ever; School’s been blown to pieces, oh! No more books, no more teachers.” In our view the record is subversive. I hope you will agree and take the appropriate action. It could also amount to an incitement to violence.’ Amazingly, the producers agreed to ban the video; a few days later, Cooper sent Whitehouse flowers to thank her for the publicity.58
Whitehouse’s most famous target, however, inhabited a very different world from the theatrical violence of an Alice Cooper concert. For all her determination, stamina and articulacy, her instincts sometimes led her badly awry, and in devoting so much attention to Doctor Who she made herself look frankly ridiculous. Even though parents often complained that it was too frightening for very young children, few would have described the teatime show as full of ‘the sickest, most horrible material … obscene violence and horror’. Yet to Mrs Whitehouse it was one of the most disturbing shows on television. She ‘believes the Saturday serial is giving nightmares to under-sevens’, explained the Evening News in January 1975, adding that she wanted ‘to “exterminate” the zany Doctor and his unearthly foes’. After watching the third episode of ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ two months later, for instance, she complained to the BBC that there had been ‘so much violence and sadism … that I believe this particular episode should not have been screened before 9 pm’. In March 1976, meanwhile, after watching Tom Baker defeat a giant man-eating plant in ‘The Seeds of Doom’, she solemnly denounced the programme’s reliance on ‘strangulation – by hand, by claw, by obscene vegetable matter’. Of course this only made her look absurd: if she wanted to maximize her public support, she would have done better to stick to genuine pornography than to worry about obscene vegetable matter. And yet the revealing thing is that for all the mockery, the BBC took her seriously. Eight months later, when the Doctor’s head was violently held under water in the climax to episode three of ‘The Deadly Assassin’, she wrote again ‘in anger and despair … because at a time when little children would be viewing, you showed violence of a quite unacceptable kind’. This time the BBC took note: the director general wrote her a letter of apology, while the master tape was edited to ensure that the freeze-frame cliffhanger could never be shown again.59
What the BBC had realized, of course, was that Whitehouse was more than an isolated crank. In March 1975, the Sun had mockingly wondered: ‘How many of us does Mary Whitehouse really speak for?’ But her support was wider than her critics often imagined. In January 1972, after the defendants in the Oz obscenity trial had been freed on appeal, she launched a ‘Nationwide Petition for Public Decency’, which called for the strengthening of the obscenity laws and might have been expected to sink without trace. Yet by the time she formally presented the petition to Edward Heath in April 1973 it had attracted a staggering 1.35 million signatures, making it by far the most successful petition since the peace campaigns of the 1930s. According to Whitehouse’s own (unverifiable) figures, more than eight out of ten of people approached had agreed to sign, and there can be little doubt that it represented a genuine surge of public feeling. And then there was her pressure group, the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, founded in 1965 as a descendant of Clean-Up TV, which by the mid-1970s boasted a membership of about 31,000 people in twenty-eight regional branches. It might well be objected that this hardly made it a mass movement in a country of almost 60 million people. Even so, this made it roughly the same size as the Communist Party and much bigger than the National Front and the Socialist Workers’ Party, while there were many more NVALA members than, say, Oz readers. But then of course the NVALA’s members were overwhelmingly female, elderly and middle-class, precisely the kind of people often overlooked not just by journalists but by historians, too. Many, perhaps most, were committed Christians; many lived in rural areas; a majority were connected to ‘the older professions, small businessmen, traders and shopkeepers’. These were people who lamented the abolition of the death penalty and the rise of the mugger, inveighed against the ‘rent-a-crowd’ agitators allegedly whipping up the unions, and struggled to contain their horror at Heath’s supposed appeasement of socialism. ‘I think this permissiveness comes to us through television and the newspapers,’ explained a maths and scripture teacher from Lancashire. ‘I’m very sympathetic to Enoch Powell …’60
From the very beginning, Whitehouse saw her movement in explicitly political terms. As a middle-class schoolteacher from the West Midlands she was a natural conservative; more importantly, however, she had for decades been a member of the evangelical Christian group Moral Re-armament, which had a fiercely anti-Communist thrust. At the root of the new permissiveness, she argued, was the ‘the secular/humanist/Marxist philosophy’, and her husband Ernest even told an interviewer that they were fighting back against the ‘pressure from the left-wing’ to ‘destroy the Christian faith’. Throughout her career, she never failed to link permissiveness and socialism, arguing – as did many like-minded people during the Wilson and Heath years – that they were part of the same campaign to subvert British democracy. ‘The enemies of the West’, she once explained, ‘saw that Britain was the kingpin of Western civilisation; she had proved herself unbeatable on the field of battle because of her faith and her character. If Britain was to be destroyed, those things must be undercut.’ Just as many grass-roots Conservatives believed that behind the industrial unrest of the 1970s was a tight-knit cabal of Communist agents, therefore, Mary Whitehouse believed, the BBC’s output was inspired by Reds at Television Centre. ‘They’ve infiltrated the trade unions,’ she argued. ‘Why does anyone still believe they haven’t infiltrated broadcasting?’ As she explained in her book Whatever Happened to Sex? (1977), groups as diverse as the National Council for Civil Liberties, the Albany Trust, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality and the Humanist Society all belonged to the same conspiracy, run by ‘dogma-riddled lefties who see the undermining of morality as the prerequisite of take-over’. Not even the Radio Times was safe from subversion: after the much-loved listings magazine had run a mischievous cover montage of Christ, Tariq Ali and Coco the Clown, she warned the Daily Telegraph that it had fallen victim to a ‘disturbing leftist trend’.61
In many ways, therefore, the NVALA looks like an early example of the mildly eccentric protest groups that emerged out of the ruin of the Heath government in the mid-to-late 1970s, protesting vociferously about inflation, taxes and the impending triumph of international socialism. Like them, it appealed to provincial middle-class homeowners who felt that their values of entrepreneurship, discipline and thrift were under threat, and that they had been betrayed and abandoned by Heath’s Conservative Party. And yet as Whitehouse’s roots in Moral Re-armament might suggest, there was another dimension to the NVALA. By the standards of the day, she was an exceptionally pious woman: every day began with a Bible-reading in bed, and she said morning prayers before breakfast. And unlike most British women in the 1970s, she was completely convinced of the presence of the divine in her life. When her son Christopher suffered an accident and seemed likely to lose an eye, she telephoned her friends and organized prayers for him, and when the eye was unexpectedly saved, she was convinced that God had intervened. Her work, she later wrote, was about ‘fulfilling God’s purpose’; indeed, a detailed academic analysis of her career published in 1979 concluded that the central aim of the NVALA was ‘to colonise social life for God’. There was more to Whitehouse’s movement, in other words, than the economic and political anxiety of the middle classes; at a very basic level, it was a religious crusade to rescue the embattled Christian family from the ‘left-wing humanists’, a cry of rage by a pious minority against what they saw as the secularization and godlessness of modern British life.62
And this, of course, was why it failed. Despite the genuine public unease manifested in the Petition for Public Decency, there were just not enough churchgoing Christians left to support a religious revival. Even in 1960, just one in ten people had gone to church every week, and with living standards rising and so many other things to do at weekends, numbers had since continued to plummet. In total, Protestant church membership fell by almost 20 per cent in the course of the 1960s, and by the time Edward Heath became Prime Minister fewer than 2 per cent of adolescent boys were confirmed in the Church of England, while only a minority of babies were baptized. Swelled by immigration from Ireland, the Catholic Church made a better fist of keeping its members, but the Methodists and Baptists saw their congregations fall by up to a third. All in all, just 1.5 million people went to church every week in 1970, and for all Mary Whitehouse’s efforts to rekindle the faith, death, disaffection and sheer indifference had whittled that down to 1.25 million by the end of the 1970s. It is true that Britain was not yet an entirely secular society: the massive sales of, for example, Malcolm Muggeridge’s book on Mother Teresa in 1971 showed that many people were still fascinated by religious questions, and polls consistently showed that about three out of four people believed in God and just under half in life after death. But even if the popular fascination with spiritual questions survived, Britain in the 1970s was what the sociologist Grace Davie calls a society of ‘believing without belonging’, in which religious participation had fallen a long way from fashion. It was hardly surprising that when The Times carried out a survey on power and influence in British life, only 2 per cent of respondents thought the Church of England was ‘very influential’, compared with 33 per cent who named the TUC and 52 per cent who identified Mary Whitehouse’s enemies at the BBC.63
What baffled Whitehouse, however, was that she could not even count on the support of the Anglican hierarchy. As Archbishop of Canterbury since 1961, the gentle, scholarly Michael Ramsey had steered the Church of England on a notably progressive course. He strongly supported the campaign for the legalization of homosexuality, voted for (and indeed offered to introduce in the Lords) the abolition of hanging, and encouraged the Church to take a more liberal line on divorce reform; on top of that, he vociferously opposed apartheid in South Africa and the war in Vietnam, and even argued for military intervention against the white supremacist rebels in Rhodesia. Other Churches, especially the Methodists, took a similarly liberal course: even the once austerely conservative Church of Scotland, for example, supported the decriminalization of homosexuality and the reform of the divorce laws, and in 1970 its Moral Welfare Committee even welcomed the advent of sexual permissiveness, commenting that ‘the spirit of the age with its new found freedoms, and its healthy intolerance of humbug and hypocrisy, challenges Christians to re-think the implications of Christian morality – not a bad thing to have to do’. To moral conservatives like Whitehouse, all of this was bewildering and unsettling: the explanation, she thought, was that the Churches had been taken over by ‘soft permissives’. Ramsey’s postbag was often full of furious letters from ordinary Anglicans: his secretary never forgot one occasion when Ramsey gently put one letter aside with the words: ‘I don’t think that is of much value as it begins “You lying bastard”.’64
But to many older parishioners who were not familiar or comfortable with the latest trends in liturgy and theology, Ramsey’s leadership seemed characteristic of a religious landscape that had been infiltrated by bleeding-hearted socialists, happy-clappy weirdos and guitar-wielding hippies, in which all familiar landmarks and conventions had vanished. Even in fiction, respect for the Church seemed to be ebbing away: in television sitcoms of the early 1970s, clergymen are almost exclusively feeble, hand-wringing figures, like the incompetent clowns who run St Ogg’s Cathedral in All Gas and Gaiters, or the ineffectual, effeminate Reverend Timothy Farthing in Dad’s Army. And as congregations dwindled, so a sense of almost inevitable decline seemed to set in. ‘Oh Christianity, Christianity, … are you vanishing?’ asked the poet Stevie Smith, anticipating the collapse of faith into ‘beliefs we do not believe in’. Other poets sounded a similar note: in the Anglican priest R. S. Thomas’s ‘Via Negativa’ (1972), God is ‘that great absence / In our lives, the empty silence / Within …’, while in ‘The Moon in Lleyn’ (1975), Thomas ponders the idea that ‘religion is dead’. Other churchmen were inclined to agree: at lunch with James Lees-Milne in October 1973, the Bishop of Gloucester reflected sadly on ‘the loneliness and desolation of the spirit’ of the modern priest. ‘No clergyman in the Church of England today’, he added, ‘could claim spiritual success. He said that in his city eighty per cent of the inhabitants had never heard of him and didn’t care tuppence for his office.’ Against this background, Mary Whitehouse’s dreams of a Christian renaissance were doomed from the start.65
In many ways Mary Whitehouse’s career, like the stories of the Festival of Light, the Longford report and the Responsible Society, was a study in failure. For all the enthusiasm of her supporters, indeed for all the widespread disquiet at Britain’s alleged moral decline, polls showed that most people did not want to turn back the clock. Interviewed in 1973, not only did three out of four people agree that adults should be allowed to buy indecent materials if they wanted to, but seven out of ten admitted they had never been seriously upset by an ‘indecent display’. And although the Heath government introduced an Indecent Displays Bill at the end of 1973 to crack down on the visibility of pornography (including, splendidly, measures against the threat of ‘indecent sounds’), it never made it onto the statute book – and the evidence of obscenity trials later in the decade suggests it might not have worked anyway. Time after time, juries acquitted proprietors and producers accused of corrupting public morals. In the most celebrated case, which came to court in 1974, a cameraman called John Lindsay was accused of making twenty-nine indecent films, which included scenes of schoolgirls pleasuring themselves with hockey sticks, nuns masturbating with crucifixes, priests debauching nuns in a convent, and what Lindsay himself called ‘the worst of the lot … a film called Anal Rape in a classroom with a very young-looking blonde girl’. According to the prosecution, these films showed ‘sex in the nastiest, rawest fashion, bestial and perverted, without any question of love or tenderness’, while the judge, Mr Justice Wien, denounced ‘the unnatural and horrible offence of sodomy’, and reminded the jury what had happened to Sodom and Gomorrah. The jury failed to return a verdict, and after a retrial, Lindsay was found not guilty. So were a couple accused of running a magazine called Libertine from a shop in Leicester, three years later. Once again, anal rape played an oddly central role in the proceedings; once again, the verdict was not guilty. As the triumphant couple left the court, one of the female jurors cheerfully remarked: ‘It’s a lot of old rubbish, isn’t it, my duck?’66
While the failure to stem the flow of pornography in the 1970s owed as much to the chaos of the obscenity laws as to the relaxation of popular attitudes, what happened to sex education was not so different. As with pornography, there was a great flurry of popular outrage in 1971–2, helping to create what one account calls a ‘new discourse on sexual education’ that anticipated the debates during the Thatcher years. And yet while the Family Planning Association was forced into a series of embarrassing retreats in the summer of 1971 – including the withdrawal of an explicit leaflet for teenagers entitled Straight Facts and the cancellation of fringe events at a ‘New Frontiers of Birth Control’ conference (including a bizarre wheeze to release tens of thousands of condom-themed balloons into the skies above London) – the Responsible Society and its allies never regained control of sex education. The FPA continued to offer increasingly explicit and non-judgemental advice, such as a splendid leaflet from 1973, Too Great A Risk!, which was modelled on a Jackie comic strip and featured a pretty, sexually active teenage girl learning how to avoid getting pregnant. A year later, the FPA launched a new national campaign, Tomorrow’s People Are Today’s Concern, calling for ‘sex education programmes for all schools in the United Kingdom … to undo the layers of shame, fear, ignorance, distortion and misinformation’. Once again there were howls of protest from moral conservatives, and the protesters did win isolated victories: the cancellation of a highly explicit ITV documentary series called Sex in Our Time in 1976, for example, or the censorship of a new Nuffield Secondary Science textbook with explicit diagrams and references to masturbation. But while the sex education war went on, so did sex education itself, reaching an ever wider proportion of Britain’s teenagers. In this respect, too, Whitehouse and her allies had lost.67
The fact was that, thanks to the decline of churchgoing, the erosion of collective loyalties, the advent of affluence and mass secondary education, the challenge of feminism and homosexuality and the rise of a new kind of populist individualism, there no longer existed an agreed moral consensus around which people could instinctively rally. The ideal of the stable, settled family survived, of course; so too did the ideal of the happy, enduring marriage. In their daily lives, however, growing numbers of people found these ideals impossible to live up to – perhaps partly because of their own exaggerated expectations and their obsession with self-gratification, but also surely because of the increasing economic pressures on the traditional family. As the historian Jeffrey Weeks notes, people still talked of ‘love, honesty, faithfulness’ as fundamental values, and in the world of the imagination the nuclear family remained the norm. Increasingly, however, events in the real world suggested otherwise. The advice columns of just one issue of Woman’s Own from January 1975 told the wider story. A photographer had written to complain that his 16-year-old son ought to knuckle down and get a haircut; his wife, however, objected that they ought not to ‘suppress’ their son’s personality. One woman kept her teenage daughter at home, frightened that meeting boys would lead to venereal disease, pregnancy and abortion; another, the wife of a garage mechanic, wrote that she was happy for her 15-year-old daughter to go on the Pill. There were no longer any binding rules; there were no easy answers.68
And yet there were limits to popular permissiveness. In 1963, the Profumo sex-and-spying scandal had almost destroyed Harold Macmillan’s government, and even after a decade of social and cultural change, nobody could be certain that the public would look any more kindly on politicians’ sexual failings. And as luck would have it, on 14 May 1973, just weeks before the tenth anniversary of the last great scandal, a relatively obscure government whip sent a panicky handwritten letter to the Chief Whip, Francis Pym, marked ‘Private and Confidential’. In it, Sir John Stradling-Thomas reported that thanks to another Tory MP who had been talking to one of Rupert Murdoch’s PR men, he had got wind of a sensational tale that was apparently poised to destroy the government. ‘Murdoch has a “Profumo” type story on the stocks with photographs,’ he reported ominously, ‘about a junior minister who is involved in sexual orgies with back benchers. The official car is involved. The story is about to break.’69
The junior minister at the centre of this garbled rumour was by any standards an extraordinarily colourful character. Described by a profile in The Times as a ‘politician, journalist, aristocrat and eccentric’, Antony Lambton had been MP for Berwick-upon-Tweed since 1951. Afflicted since childhood with an eye disease, he always wore dark glasses, giving him an engagingly mysterious air, and he championed an odd combination of reactionary and libertarian causes, from the revival of National Service to the reform of the obscenity laws. His lifestyle was raffish, to say the least: rated as one of the best three shots in the country, he owned two vast estates in the North of England as well as an elegant London townhouse, and was well known for his generosity, sardonic wit and appreciation of the female form. In 1970, Heath had made him Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Defence with responsibility for the RAF, but Lambton was best known for a bizarre and protracted squabble over his title. On the death of his father, the fifth Earl of Durham, in the same year, he had disclaimed his peerage so that he could stay in the Commons, but insisted that he should still be known as Lord Lambton. Most of his fellow MPs, as well as numerous constitutional experts, thought this was absurd. But Lambton took it oddly seriously. The battle over the title had ‘become an obsession with him’, an MI5 officer reported after Lambton’s fall, ‘to the extent that he was no longer able to read – and he had been a great reader – and he sought to forget his obsession in frantic activity. He had for example become an enthusiastic and vigorous gardener. Another example of this frenzied activity was his debauchery.’70
Whatever his motives, by the end of 1971 Lambton had become a regular client of a high-class escort agency run by London’s ‘leading madam’, the aptly named Jean Horn. There his particular favourite was an attractive 26-year-old Irish-born prostitute called Norma, who had set herself up in an expensive Regency flat in Maida Vale and claimed to earn an astonishing £2,500 tax-free a week. By Norma’s own account, the man she called ‘Mr Lucas’ had interesting tastes, often asking her to procure other girls or to watch him having sex with another man. His anonymity did not last long, however: with typically careless insouciance, Lambton used to pay her by personal cheque, so she soon realized that he was a government minister. What made this reckless behaviour even more dangerous, however, was the fact that in late 1972 Norma married a shady ‘cab driver’ (although he never seemed to drive any cabs) called Colin Levy, who was determined to make some money from his wife’s connections. At the end of the following April, Levy installed a hidden camera in his wife’s wardrobe and a listening device in the nose of her giant teddy bear, already a somewhat incongruous addition to the decor. On 5 May, he offered the recordings of Lambton and his wife to the News of the World, but the quality was deemed substandard. Instead, the newspaper installed its own equipment in the flat, with sensational results. On 9 May, they recorded Lambton asking Norma if she could get him drugs; the following day, a News of the World photographer hid inside the wardrobe, snapping away through a two-way mirror while Lambton enjoyed himself with Norma and a black prostitute. Inexplicably, however, executives at the News of the World got cold feet and decided to shelve the story. So Levy offered it instead to the Sunday People – who promptly passed the material to the police.71
This was not the first time that the police had heard about Lambton’s extramarital adventures. Like Christine Keeler before her, Norma Levy found it hard to keep her mouth shut, and as early as 2 May the Home Office had asked MI5 to investigate ‘security doubts’ about Lambton and two other ministers rumoured to be using prostitutes. The Security Service reported back that there was ‘no adverse information’ about any of them in their files, but by this stage Heath and his senior ministers were becoming distinctly anxious. In this context, Stradling-Thomas’s letter about the ‘ “Profumo” type story’ was deeply worrying, and on 18 May Heath himself convened a meeting of his chief aides and ordered another MI5 investigation. Three days later, Lambton was formally interviewed by the police and admitted that ‘a photograph showing a man on a bed with two women was of him and that the cigarette which he was smoking in the photograph was of cannabis’. A few hours later, he went to see Francis Pym, told him the whole story and added that the police had searched his flat and found more cannabis and amphetamines. Nobody had attempted to blackmail him, he pointed out; but the drugs alone made his position untenable. That night, Lambton resigned. ‘All that has happened is that some sneak pimp has seen an opportunity of making some money by the sale of the story and secret photographs to the papers at home and abroad,’ read his remarkably honest statement the next day. ‘I have no excuses whatsoever to make. I behaved with incredible stupidity.’72
Lambton’s resignation was the cue for what the Mirror called ‘a day of sensation’. Within hours of the announcement, the police had re-interviewed the fallen minister, even asking him to strip to his red flannel underwear so that they could check for heroin injection marks. Meanwhile, Heath had been handed an MI5 report identifying a second minister who regularly visited call girls: the Leader of the House of Lords, Earl Jellicoe, who had patronized Mayfair Escorts since 1970. Poor Jellicoe had no connection with either Lambton or the Levys, and MI5 thought that the ‘risk of indiscretions’ was ‘negligible’. But Heath felt he could not afford to take chances. That evening Jellicoe was intercepted as he and his wife were leaving the Royal Opera House and whisked to Downing Street, and by the next morning he was out too. Since he was enormously popular with his fellow peers, the outcry was immediate. The Labour leader in the Lords, Lord Shackleton, declared that ‘we and the country have suffered a grievous loss’, while the former Labour minister Richard Crossman wrote that the government had lost ‘one of [its] bravest, ablest, most decent members’. Even Lambton sardonically remarked that ‘the way things were going it will soon be clear that Heath is the only member of the government who doesn’t do it’. In fact, behind the bravado Lambton was devastated by the scandal. In public, however, he kept up a characteristically insouciant front. When Robin Day asked him on Panorama why on earth he had done it, Lambton’s reaction was priceless. ‘People sometimes like variety,’ he remarked. ‘Surely all men visit whores?’73
On the surface the Lambton affair – and especially the resignation of Jellicoe, who, as almost everybody recognized, had been extremely unlucky – was a testament to the lingering conservatism of popular attitudes. Lambton’s fall was not merely a question of ‘security’, an outraged P. A. Carnwath of London W8 wrote to The Times, for there was ‘a moral case for the resignation of a minister who is publicly known to have been involved with a call girl’. And as J. W. M. Thompson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph, saw it, Lambton’s fall was a sign that the baleful influence of the 1960s had penetrated far less than many conservatives feared. ‘The new morality of sexual free-for-all has been assiduously propounded,’ he noted, ‘transforming the general idea of what is free for public consumption by way of entertainment or information.’ And yet the scandal demonstrated that ‘the full gale of permissiveness still belongs only in the realm of the media, or among that minority of the population who constitute the fashionable consensus. The tolerance of the majority does not imply anything approaching unqualified approval when the new morality is translated from words (or pictures) into action.’74
And yet what is so striking about the general reaction to the fall of Lambton and Jellicoe is that it was so unlike the censorious outrage that had greeted the Profumo scandal ten years previously. The Profumo affair, after all, had come close to destroying Macmillan’s government. But although the Lambton scandal dominated tabloid front pages for days with a similar mixture of sex, sensation and security, it never posed a serious threat to Edward Heath. Inside the Commons, the mood was very different from the hysteria of the summer of 1963. ‘This time’, as Bernard Levin noted, ‘Lord Wigg and the other leading Labour politicians who rose so enthusiastically into battle with “security” embroidered on their banners have not been heard from.’ Indeed, the only Labour MP who spoke out against Lambton, James Wellbeloved, was promptly dismissed by the Liberals’ John Pardoe as a ‘sanctimonious creep of the first order’. And far from rounding on Lambton and Jellicoe as their predecessors had turned on Profumo, most politicians and peers struck a notably compassionate note. ‘Is it not time that we grew up?’ the sociologist Lady Wootton of Abinger wrote to The Times. ‘Everyone knows that such affairs are common in all walks of life. There is no law against them and they do not by any means always result in divorces.’ Lambton’s critics, agreed the Labour MP Alex Lyon a few days later, were ‘hypocrites and bigots’. In the Bible, he recalled, Jesus had asked an adulterous wife’s accusers who would cast the first stone. ‘Do you feel like aiming at Lord Lambton and Lord Jellicoe?’ Lyon asked.75
In the editorial columns, the overwhelming tone was one of sympathy for both Lambton and Jellicoe. ‘A chamber of 630 members entirely free from human frailty, or deep-dyed in the conviction that they are entirely free from human frailty, would be a hard and tyrannical House,’ wrote David Wood in The Times. ‘Politics is a trade that notoriously damages family relationships and sometimes breaks up marriages. Allowances must be made.’ Even the Daily Express, usually one of the most strident voices of moral conservatism, lamented that ‘in this modern so-called permissive age a splendid [parliamentarian] and junior minister have been cast into the wilderness … Can we really afford to discard men of talent, wit and patriotism because their personal lives fall short of blameless perfection?’ And to the evident surprise of visiting journalists, Lambton’s reputation in his rural, sleepy constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed remained ‘remarkably undiminished’ by the revelations. ‘We still think he’s a perfect gentleman,’ said one of the five gamekeepers working on his estate. Among ‘shoppers in the streets and the men in the pubs’, wrote one reporter, ‘serious feelings of outrage or even anger are hard to find’. ‘Shame for his family,’ was the best he could get out of female passers-by, while most of the men confined themselves to a mere ‘Bad luck, mate.’76
While Lambton’s fall superficially testified to the limits of permissiveness, therefore, closer examination suggested a very different story. At a moment when abortion and homosexuality were legal, thousands of marriages were collapsing every year and the West End seemed awash with pornography, few people seemed genuinely shocked or even surprised by the former peer’s misbehaviour. It was ‘heartening to be able to say without doubt that things are better now than they were in 1963’, wrote Bernard Levin in the most thoughtful contemporary analysis of the affair. In 1963, Harold Macmillan had been ‘very nearly brought down, not because he was himself in any way involved, but simply because he was Prime Minister’. But as Levin noted, ‘no “Heath must go” campaign is likely today’. The reason, he thought, was that for all the outrage of Lord Longford and Mary Whitehouse, Britain now had a ‘calmer attitude’ where sexual morality was concerned. Perhaps this was going a bit far: although what Levin called the ‘fanaticism and intolerance’ of 1963 were evaporating, the success of Whitehouse’s decency petition just a few weeks earlier suggests that many people did not feel calm at all. All the same, he felt confident enough in the pace of change to risk a prediction. ‘It is exactly ten years since the last political dépit amoreux in Britain. If another decade should elapse before the next one, the compromised minister will stay in office.’ He was wrong about the details: ten years later, Cecil Parkinson failed to survive the revelation of his affair with his secretary Sara Keays, although the fact that he had fathered and abandoned a daughter made Lambton look like a pillar of moral rectitude. But in the long run, in a society in which Mary Whitehouse’s dream of stemming the tide of permissiveness had long since failed, Levin was right.77